The several simultanous
programmes collectively known as the Edinburgh Festival take over the
Scottish capital each August, bringing thousands of shows in
around-the-clock performances. No one can see more than a tiny
fraction, but we reviewed almost 150.

Originally on several
pages, we have condensed them onto one page for the archive. They're in
alphabetical order (solo comics by last name), so scroll down for what
you want or just browse.

The Al-Hamlet SummitPleasance Dome Playwright-director
Sulayman Al-Bassam transmutes Shakespeare into a contemporary Arab
setting in this production by the Zaoum Theatre that is too
infrequently more than a technical curiosity. Keeping Shakespeare's
basic plot but none of his words, the play is set in ultramodern
offices, with the characters communicating by webcams and only rarely
sharing the same space. Al-Bassam brings Shakespeare's implicit
political subtexts to the fore by replacing the ghost with the
pamphlets of a counter-revolutionary underground, to whom Hamlet is
drawn in his hatred of Claudius, so that the king's concern is less
about his nephew's madness or personal threat than about the
fundamentalist insurrection he threatens. And strolling through the
background of almost every scene is an enigmatic female arms dealer,
her presence suggesting that all are pawns of larger outside forces.
While some characters and elements - Laertes, the Nunnery scene -
translate quite effectively into the new setting, many others, notably
the Prayer, Closet and Mad scenes, do not. In the end, the play
illuminates Shakespeare slightly by reminding us of the political
themes and ennobles the contemporary setting slightly by presenting it
in the form of classical tragedy. But for the most part its
accomplishment is merely that it manages to pull off what too rarely
seems more than a gimmick. Gerald Berkowitz

And The World Goes RoundBedlam
A student group, many from Trinity College of Music, float through this
Kander-and-Ebb anthology show without either performers or songs making
much impression. It is actually difficult to see why. The singers have
fine voices, and act their little hearts out when appropriate, but far
too rarely do any of the songs come alive, and then it is their
inherent quality, not the performances, that do it. Of course the kids
stand in the long shadows of some mythic performers, so that their
versions of And All That Jazz or Maybe This Time almost inevitably
disappoint. It is when they do something to make the songs their own -
a down-tempo harmonising to Cabaret or multilingual New York New York -
that they shine best. And it should be noted that, in spite of being
miked, in spite of being in a small space, and in spite of the band
being restrained, their lyrics are frequently drowned out by the music.
Don't they teach anything about projection at Trinity College?
Gerald Berkowitz

Dan Antopolski Pleasance
A Heineken among comedians, Dan Antopolski reaches the parts others
don't. The baffling thing is working out precisely what those parts are
since, like a latterday Wheeltappers and Shunters compere, the groans
he evokes from the crowd are as pleasurable as the laughs. Tonight he
had a gift in an entire front row of Americans which meant double money
for his 'get to know the audience' spoof. Weaving his scripted act in
and out of the improv patter, he soon settles down to the act itself -
a lucky dip of gags, observations, dodgy props and crooned ditties.
These include nude mindgames with his accountant while putting Andrew
Lloyd Webber musicals on expenses, Darth Vader and asthma, tampons on
the NHS, a serenade (Careless Whisper) by his right foot to his trainer
before getting down to some serious toe lurve. There's nothing hit and
miss about these surreal launches into the slightly unknown. Throw-away
or meaningful, Antolpski's material is immaterial since his disarming
style and mastery of inflection mean that even a single word becomes a
punchline in itself. Having said that, he delivered the best tasteless
Queen Mother joke so far this Festival. Nick Awde

Bachman and Evans - Special Edition
Pleasance
The Special Edition appendage refers to a new DVD of the comic duo's
show lovingly reproduced here in "live format" complete with frame by
frame commentary options from smug director and Big Brother sidekick.
Other features include freeze action, rewind and foreign language
options - all reproduced with a manic attention to detail. The
mini-soap details the eventful flat share of James Bachman (the one
like a "plumper Alan Davies") and Mark Evans ("Ian Hislop's drowned
corpse") where the latter leads a glamorous highflying life while the
former just mopes about. But one day Evans finds himself in the local
cornershop and there he purchases a carton of secret formula Ribena -
the proprietor used to be a mad scientist - which handily turns him
into a superhero. His super powers reveal his flatemate is a sham
(surprisingly, for example, his runaway Chicken Twix concept was all
made up) but soon the worm turns and Bachman becomes his evil
super-nemesis. The hi-tech concept is rendered deliberately lo-tech,
producing some wonderful clashes of interpretation, jogged along by
surreal turns of phrase and a Goonish propensity for preposterous
props. However, the puerile doctor's c*** scene and its spin-offs spoil
the whole thing. Nick Awde

Baobabs Don't Grow Here Gilded Balloon Teviot
This play from South Africa's Fresco Theatre is an attempt to create a
modern myth and fairy tale while infusing it with socio-political
import, so they might be disappointed if I say it is just a fairly
successful piece of light entertainment. James Cunningham and Helen
Iskander (who devised it with director Sylvaine Strike) play two Romany
gypsies travelling through Africa because of a family myth that a
baobab tree will encourage baby-making. They actually spend
three-quarters of the play in North Africa before they figure out they
want to be a few thousand miles south and then get there in a minute of
mime - perhaps a result of the improvisational process getting bogged
down in early material. Anyway, there's some funny mime of chasing
trains, getting lost in the Casbah and the like, along with some clever
use of a few drapes and some miniatures to evoke the journey. But the
whole premise never makes sense, and the two performers have clashing
styles, he playing fairly straight while she affects the bugeyed
grimaces and exaggerated reactions characteristic of some who have
studied with the wrong French masters. Gerald Berkowitz

Battery
Operated Birds Pleasance
This group-created piece by Theatre Trash presents itself as a comment
on a world full of rules and instructions, but you wouldn't know it if
you hadn't read the programme note. What you see are a series of
essentially unrelated scenes involving a core group of characters. A
boarding house landlady tries to maintain the fantasy that her
residents are a happy family. One boarder, a sad planespotter, tells
obviously falsified tales of his romance and marriage. The other
boarders let a very thin veneer of excessive politeness barely mask
their aggression. From time to time a disembodied voice gives a
conventional safety warning, such as be careful with knives, which is
the cue for someone onstage to cut himself. Then everyone moves
backwards to replay the scene until the offender gets it right. But
these sequences are no more central to the work than the scenes of
self-delusion or, indeed, the scenes with no clear content at all. The
cast of five do a fair job of pretending they know what's going on,
though most in the audience are less successful. Gerald
Berkowitz

BBC New Comedy Awards Grand
FinalGeorge Square Theatre Climaxing
a series of nationwide heats, the eight finalists in the BBC
competition appeared together for a final head-to-head, to be broadcast
next month. The finalists were easily divided into two groups. Karl
Spain, Paul Kerensa, Ninia Benjamin and Bob Kobe offered typical
stand-up sets with varying degrees of success. But the other four each
had an effective original touch. Gary Delaney delivered a languid,
laid-back series of off-the-wall one-liners much in the mode of
American comic Steve Wright, holding the stage through his pauses with
confidence and authority. Stefano Paolini displayed a remarkable
repertoire of voices and sounds, at one point creating percussion,
music and lyrics of a rap number all with his mouth. Ventriloquist Nina
Conti, whose Edinburgh act last year was weak, had progressed
remarkably both in technical ability and in sharpness of material, so
that her interaction with a cheeky monkey doll was fresh and funny. And
Chris Tisdall's comic persona Dylan, a West Country rustic, proved an
audacious experiment in eschewing jokes entirely and just letting the
character behave naturally to comic effect. In the end the judges chose
Conti, with Paolini and Dylan as runners-up, all popular choices,
though for my money the funniest person onstage was host Jimmy Tarbuck,
whose adlibs and fillers during breaks in taping outclassed everyone
else, while the weakest was warm-up Phil Nichol, who became
increasingly frantic as material that normally works with his fans
repeatedly died. Gerald Berkowitz

BedheadC Fuse
Productions' company-devised play is the sort of thing you feel halfway
through that you don't like, but discover by the end that you have
liked very much indeed. Its portrait of the lives of super-slacking
twenty-somethings is presented with such benign affection and with such
inventive staging that it is a delight. The play follows the nights and
morning-afters of flatmates played by Jake Smith, Ben Davies and Sarah
Coyle, with a very inventive design allowing one set to serve as the
bedrooms of each. They drink, have hangovers, lie about, bring people
home, have nightmares, and try to revive themselves with endless cups
of tea - not necessarily in that order, but in a regular rotation. Each
actor doubles and quadruples as various friends, lovers and partygoers,
and not the least of the play's pleasures is the technical skill with
which, under Chris Gage's flawless direction, they accomplish
lightning-quick changes. In the end, two of the three become a couple
while, with their aid, the third finds a girlfriend of his own. No
doubt many in the audience will recognize their lives or memories in
this depiction, but infused with a warmth and innocence that are a
tribute to sensitivity of the writer-performers. Gerald
Berkowitz

Best of Irish ComedyThe
Stand Six
o'clock is perhaps not a prime time for a comedy club, and performers
and audiences at the Stand's Irish showcase can find the going
particularly hit-and-miss. Lineups change from day to day. On this
occasion compere David O'Doherty has some trouble warming up the crowd
at the start, though at his reappearance later he scores with a routine
about the difficulties of writing a traditionally sombre Irish
autobiography when you grew up in middle class comfort. Dierdre O'Kane
comes on with high energy, generating laughs with her accounts of the
Irish version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and building further
with a good riff on why the Irish can neither give nor take compliments
gracefully, though a piece on sexual fantasies doesn't work as well as
it might at a later hour. Andrew Maxwell takes the stage with confident
authority, scoring quickly with some ad libs and then solidifying his
control of the audience by exploring the image of a Scottish
Disneyland. From then on everything works, from jokes on skin cancer to
an extended riff on Edinburgh tramps at festival time, with his
anti-Scottish barbs generating the biggest laughs. Gerald
Berkowitz

Big Value Comedy Show -
Early Cafe Royal Four
comics for less than the price of one elsewhere is pretty good value
for money, even if the selection is inevitably hit-and-miss. Compere
Justin Moorhouse has a nice line in self-depreciating fat jokes to
supplement a typical warm-up of audience chatter and insult. Hal
Cruttenden's act is built on the tribulations of being a straight man
with effeminate mannerisms and a high-pitched voice, though he makes
some attempts to branch out from that limited base with a sequence of
jokes about living with a Northern Irish wife. Rohan Agalawatta stands
out from the crowd by telling actual jokes, a string of unrelated one-
and two-liners that score by their novelty and unpredictability. His
short set exposes a danger of this approach, which has little room for
ad libbing, but as he develops more material his act should grow
stronger. Headliner Jim Jeffries runs through a lot of familiar topics,
from TV commercials through Big Brother and boy bands, from a
refreshingly skewed Australian perspective. Having warmed the audience
up with this safe material, he effectively switches to more openly
sexual jokes, taking care, as he notes, to offend men and women equally.
Gerald Berkowitz

Big Value Comedy - Late Café Royal Host for the evening is
Al Pitcher, a disarming New Zealander motormouth whose skills in crowd
control are second to none. Working his way through the crowd he
stumbled across real jewels: the Scot with removable teeth, the lawyer
sat behind the prison officer, the Frenchwoman with a leg broken from
skittling British cows. He milked each leaving enough to link up the
rest of the evening. Kicking off is Darrell Martin whose immensely
engaging patter of gags and observation of life on the road failed to
save him from a comatose Sunday night audience - he stumbled at that
vital first gag and valiantly struggled to catch up. A very funny man
who deserved better. Angie McEvoy's laid-back delivery hides a wicked
incisiveness that can catch you off guard - as indeed it's meant to.
Her impending nuptials cued a whip-round for suggestions about
successful relationships, each of which she pounced on and despatched
with a sly put-down. Last on is Australian Steve Hughes, who combines a
sleepy drawl with exquisite timing and Satan death metal looks. He
lights a slowburner of a set that relentlessly sucks you into his
warped world of Sydneyites and mowing Scotland in a day - yet under the
severely dark humour beats a surprisingly political conscience.
Nick Awde

Cameron Blair in Afrodisiac Gilded BalloonEver
since Richard Stilgoe mangled the comic song territory so lovingly
staked out by the late and great Jake Thackery, I've felt bum-numbing
apprehension each time a comedian reaches for an acoustic guitar
(Boothby Graffoe excepted). In between gags, Blair knocks out a number
of ditties that aren't that bad but slot uneasily into the act since
there are at least three different concepts jostling for space: the
songs do Yoda voices and a three-part alternative Scooby Doo a la Jimi
Hendrix, politics gets a look-in with amusing though out of date quips,
while promising observation stems from Blair's perspective as a New
Zealander based in London. Additional material comes in the shape of a
one-man re-enactment of Braveheart plus an promising but underdeveloped
rant about PC grammar checks and that dreaded green squiggle under
tracts of what makes sense to you (btw: the 'afro' in the title simply
refers to his mop of blonde curls). Blair looks a funny guy but he's
still a comic in search of a theme ­ or management. Nick Awde

BloodGilded Balloon Teviot
A guy and a girl meet on a Jamaican beach at a tourist orgy. Seven
years later they are still together after that first hedonistic locking
of eyes and a voodoo wedding but now that perfect moment has fizzled.
One night they find themselves plunged into a supernatural menage a
trois when a succubus ­ a demon that possesses people for sexual
purposes ­ appears demanding they put the fire back into their lives or
perish. Awkwardly at first then passionately they reveal their
innermost sexual fantasies and then something magical happens as it
kicks into a emotional rollercoaster that is alternately funny, sexy,
moody and spine-tingling. As the beset couple, Sarah McGuinness settles
down to more measured feistiness after an over-frenetic start while
Benjamin Brown opts for a brilliantly understated performance. However,
an unnecessary distraction for this focused, stark production lurks in
their Caribbean accents that make supplementary characters sound like
Nigerian leprechauns. Writer and director Michael Phillip Edwards
neatly dissects racial as well as gender politics to create a daring,
spirited work that effortlessly makes the case for female and male
sexuality in the same breath. Nick Awde

The Blue OrphanTraverse
Like a chamber opera production of Our Town designed by Salvador Dali,
Catalyst Theatre's new offering is a visual and aural delight, a
celebration of myth-like innocence with the haunting evanescence of a
dream. Written by director Jonathan Christenson and actor Joey
Tremblay, the musical play depicts a day in the life of a North
American village, with the theme of impermanence established from the
start with the announcement that the town will be destroyed by a
tornado before nightfall. There is little plot, as we are introduced to
a string of characters and told their back stories: the old woman
dreaming of an encounter years ago with the rare butterfly of the
title, a street urchin who sells paper butterflies, a young man leaving
the security of an orphanage to face the next phase in his life, a
young woman dreaming of metamorphosis, and others. Clearly butterflies
as symbols of change, beauty and fragility flit through the play,
Bretta Gerecke's design of scrims and curtains providing a visual
parallel. Michael Scholar Jr as the orphan serves as our guide,
sustaining an elegiac tone that is supported by Sheri Somerville's
beautiful singing of Jonathan Christenson's haunting music, while every
member of the cast, from Harvey Anderson's panto dame nun through Beth
Graham's irrepressibly life-affirming waif, gives a performance of
exquisite delicacy. The ninety-minute show is perhaps ten minutes
longer than ideal, and the whimsey does get a bit thick at times, but
for those who give themselves over to its beauty, this can be the high
point of the festival. Gerald Berkowitz

The Bomb-itty of ErrorsPleasance
It sounds like a really bad idea - a rap version of Shakespeare. But in
fact this visitor from Off-Broadway is witty, clever, entertaining and
remarkably true to the spirit of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors (the
one about two sets of identical twins who were separated as children
and are now mistaken for each other). Four rappers and a DJ play all
the roles, with some remarkable quick changes and hilarious
characterisations, particularly the dumb blonde who quickly becomes the
audience's favourite. Deviser-director Andy Goldberg follows
Shakespeare's plot quite closely, sometimes line-for-line, while the
translation into contemporary vernacular and rap rhythms (for those who
care, essentially anapestic tetrameter in rhymed couplets - ain't I
erudite?) is witty and sufficiently varied in rap styles to stay fresh
throughout. There's plenty of visual comedy and some very tight
ensemble playing, making this a Fringe high point. Gerald
Berkowitz

Addy Borgh - Hearing Voices
Pleasance DomeThe
putative theme of Addy Borgh's set is the variety of voices we hear in
our heads encouraging or tempting us to rash action. But his act might
just as well be called Cybermeister, since he devotes at least as much
time to, and gets far more laughs from his ruminations about computers.
These range from a consideration of the sudden rise in significance of
the formerly useless @ key to the computer's satanic delight in telling
you you've made a fatal error. So thoroughly is his act infused with
computer consciousness that in a different part of the act he
effectively labels the blank look of a daydreamer as screen-saver face.
Among the internal voices he examines are the DeNiro-like anger voice
that lures us into road rage and the Faginish voice of temptation.
Borgh has fun doing these different sounds, and a high point is a
replay of a gangster movie scene in alternate dialects. Fast-moving,
inventive, and with enough first-rate material not to have to depend on
audience chatter, Borgh is an engaging performer who gives good value
for money. Gerald Berkowitz

Born AfricanAugustine's (reviewed
last year)
Zimbabwe's Over the Edge Theatre brings its group-created look at the
lives of contemporary Africans to an Edinburgh that has been impressed
by the company's work in past years, but may be disappointed by this
outing. Three actors - Kevin Hanssen, Wiina Msamati and Craig Peter -
play, respectively, a privileged white man, a black servant woman and
an unemployed coloured (i.e., mixed-race) man. The white, brought up in
a particularly liberal family, discovers how his culture and colour
inexorably push him toward unconscious racism. The black woman is
burdened with a son who drifts into violent crime, and can find comfort
and dignity only in remaining true to her own values. The coloured man
is forced to piece together a sense of identity and of manhood with
little help from his past or his culture. The three actors also several
subsidiary roles in each other's adventures, but the whole thing is
paced so very, very slowly (direction by Msamati and Zane E. Lucas)
that there is neither any sense of urgency to the plots nor any joy in
the acting transformations. The pace also gives us too much time to be
aware of the clichés and soap opera elements in the plots - for
example, the criminal son attacks a man who turns out to be his
half-brother by the father who deserted his mother years ago and now
encounters her again - well, you get the idea. In short, the play is
well-meaning but barely adequate as drama, relying too much on its
audience's good will and political-cultural sympathy to carry it over
its theatrical weakness. Gerald Berkowitz

Bright Colours OnlyAssembly Pauline
Goldsmith's meditation on death, dying and bereavement looks at it all
with a tenderly amused eye, domesticating the subject without
disrespecting it, and paradoxically creating one of the happiest and
most emotionally satisfying hours on the fringe. Goldsmith begins in
the persona of a frighteningly perky undertaker, welcoming us into her
parlour and proudly displaying the tacky but oh-so-tasteful-looking
accoutrements on offer, such as the gold-effect plastic handles which,
she warns us, should not actually be used to lift the coffin. She
follows with a realistic and benevolent mix of warts-and-all memories
of the departed - a spinster aunt, a grumpy grandmother - and the
incongruous behaviour of the living - watching television at a wake, or
babbling hysterically. Projections of computer-generated animations,
particularly effective in their simplicity, accompany key sequences.
Goldsmith's performance in this self-written and self-directed piece is
beautifully controlled, moving seamlessly from one persona to another
and from the gently comic to the touchingly evocative, such as the
catalogue of a child's first experiences of death or the departed's
realisation of the life not yet lived. And the piece ends with a
fourth-wall-breaking coup de theatre that is as unexpectedly moving as
it is audacious. Gerald Berkowitz

Brendon Burns - The
Thinking Man's IdiotPleasance
There's a certain apprehension at any Brendon Burns gig: will he hurl
himself into the crowd and nut someone for an over-resemblance to
Richard Branson or bang his own head repeatedly against the backstage
wall to stop the voices? It never happens but there'd be no difference
from the verbal bruising he usually lashes out. Prowling the stage like
a man desperate to pee, Burns sticks to his favourite themes of
political correctness and world idiocy and proves he's pure comic
Velcro. As usual, he's pulled a front row to die for. As usual he gets
more laughs per nanosecond than any comic on the circuit. He improbably
links a shaggy dog story about illicit goat copulation with the state
of Virgin Rail while throwing in visions of heckling at Fringe
performance art shows. Aside from a perceptive work-out on President
Dubya and Al Gore's rivalry, he steers clear of September 11 possibly
because it's done to death everywhere else. We are left with the image
of Burns launching into violent philosophical debate with an unintended
heckler as to whether the gag he's just closed with is irony or
coincidence ­ deliciously provocative. Nick Awde

Brought
to You by the Makers of Norriss ToothbrushesHill Street
Philip Hansell's short story, as adapted for the stage by Lucy Shuter
and performed by Will Gore, is a mock soap opera that moves beyond
parody to dramatise the interconnectedness of seemingly separate lives.
While a dentist's wife is cheating on him, her lover's son adores the
dentist's receptionist, who is being blackmailed for her affair with
her boss, who (unbeknownst to both of them) is actually her father.
Meanwhile, one of her mother's other former lovers is a thief breaking
into the dentist's home, where his daughter is sending hate text
messages to - well, I think I've got that right, and I know I've left a
lot out. While each new twist is funny, the characters are sketched in
effectively enough for a sense of brooding dread and fatality to
accompany the humour. Gore tells the story in a style similar to Guy
Masterson's Dylan Thomas shows, jumping from character to character,
sometimes in mid-sentence, and illustrating every word with a gesture
in an almost charades-like way. His performance is always skilled,
frequently witty and occasionally touching, the only weak points being
a couple of wordless mime sequences that are meant to serve as
dumb-show preludes to the next section of the story but are merely
opaque. Gerald Berkowitz

Cambridge Footlights -
Today of all DaysPleasanceThe
student revue, particularly at Oxford and Cambridge, has for
generations been a showcase for the cleverest undergraduate writing and
performing (and, inevitably, the nursery of generations of British
comics). Content and quality have varied over the years, with a genre
that once flaunted its erudition generally moving more toward TV-level
mainstream. This year's Cambridge entry swings the pendulum a bit back,
with a premise that assumes knowledge of Connor MacPherson's play The
Weir, about story-telling in a village pub. We get the same premise
here, with the gruff barman, visiting actor, innocent-seeming
schoolteacher and flirtatious village maiden taking turns holding the
floor. One gets the sense that each member of the cast wrote his or her
own material, and I preferred the barman's wordplay and the girl's
casual sexiness to some of the broader and more self-indulgent sequences.
Gerald Berkowitz

Camped OutPleasance
It's 1976 and it's holiday time at Pontin's where an expectant family
of safari-suited dad, buxom mum and sulky daughter have just arrived,
just part of the millions who flocked to the holiday camps that
empowered vacationers unable or simply unwilling to venture abroad.
Directed by Clare Humphrey, Mad Half Hour's physical comedy is a
fun-filled series of snapshots of the hapless trio's sojourn.
Punctuated by 8mm film clips, the vignettes come fast and furious
involving beach shenanigans, snog-lust at the disco, doggy doo and
banana skin gags, confusion of identity in the shower, plus the
ubiquitous emu puppet skewered at the end of a lusty Bluecoat's arm.
Keeping things well oiled is an authentic soundtrack involving all the
usual suspects, topped by Cilla Black and Frank Sinatra. Spliced with
deadpan Tannoy announcements, it makes the camp a living muzak heritage
park where the sixties haven't stopped swinging, the seventies aren't
quite rocking and the Swingle Singers rule supreme. Each a master of
characterisation, Michael Royce, Corinne Emerson, Katy Stephens and
Janice Dunn head an energetic cast that keep the concepts standing
proud - the knob jokes too. Nick Awde

Jo
Caulfield Pleasance
Taking a respite from writing for Graham Norton and Ruby Wax, Jo
Caulfield eases into her own show by working the audience in
time-honoured fashion. Soon everyone feels they can sit back and relax.
Wrong. Caulfield reads minds and she's sussed out who and what to
spring, sneakily setting up a battery of triggers (the mention that her
husband's Aberdonian gets an instant "baa!" response) - no one's
immune, not even her tecchie. Things are kept rampantly topical,
revolving around her recent sectarian wedding which starts a
demographic whip-round, a porn DVD commentary by her Irish mother, then
kids as designer accessories which somehow, plausibly, logically,
raucously leads to Liz Hurley's "natural alternative" to Nivea. A group
of latecomers are forced to explain why they're late - and under
Caulfield's expert handling a hilarious true story emerges about a
shaving taxi driver. Her finger's right on the audience remote control.
She pauses with evident glee, rewinds, fast-forwards or slots in a back
row punter to enhance her own chain of thought. Sometimes she just lets
the audience get on with it. And like boiling a frog, Caulfield keeps
upping the shock factor till there's no escape. Nick Awde

Caveman Inc. Pleasance
Life's tough in the world of the modern open-plan office, particularly
when you're trying to climb up the corporate ladder and most
particularly when your current position is Neolithic Man and that
open-plan office happens to be the Historical Funland theme park.
Struggling to observe the total immersion imposed by his contract, our
living tableau hero is kept on his toes 24-7. When he's not trying to
lapse from the stipulated caveman talk when taunted by VVPs (that's
Valued Vacation Participants) and their snotty brats, he's
eavesdropping on the other Funland slaves ­ they're all mad too ­ or
conscience-wrestling whether to report his co-caveworker for breaking
wind. Performer and adapter Kerry Shale is billed as the "BBC's voice
of Bill Bryson" and it is easy to see the attraction of this adaptation
from a novella by George Saunders, an American writer in similar mould.
Directed by Benjamin Twist, the tale starts slowly but grows on you as
Shale increases the Caveman's anxiety amid the creeping, funny
dysfunctionality that surrounds him. More than a piece of whimsy but
not quite an incisive slice of social commentary, this is a finely
comic piece of observation. Nick Awde

The Chicken ShowPleasance
Eryl Maynard's solo show is a lightweight, light-hearted character
study with just a bit more meat on its bones than the lunchtime
audience might expect. Maynard plays a housewife who takes a move to
the country as the opportunity to raise hens, just because she likes
the look of them wandering through her garden. The project is, of
course, more complex than she imagined, involving lots of books, an
unsympathetic vet and an overenthusiastic fox hunter. Along the way we
learn a lot of fun things about chickens, and more than a little about
their owner. That she is unhappily childless is certainly relevant, but
Maynard doesn't belabour the point, and Chrys Salt directs this
pleasant little show so that the performer's attractive and
infectiously cheery personality carries it. Gerald Berkowitz

CincinnatiAssembly
A philosophy lecturer poses this conundrum: since we can never really
appreciate another's pain, do we really believe in it? And if we don't
believe in their pain, how can we believe in them? Indeed, how can we
be sure anything exists other than us? An interesting classroom
exercise in solipsism, except that the lecturer is mad. Reacting to an
unbearable tragedy in her life, she is trying desperately to control
and cope with her own pain by compartmentalising and distancing it, and
we are watching the inevitable failure of that process. Don Nigro's
play lapses occasionally into sub-Mamet rhythms, but Nancy Walsh
carries the hour with a performance of insightfully textured intensity.
She begins on so high a note of near-hysteria that you worry she'll
have no place to go, but brilliantly surprises you by moving downward
as the character rationalises her way into the eerie calm of madness.
Gerald Berkowitz

Clearing Hedges CO2
A contemporary of thirties superathlete Jesse Owen, Babe Didrikson
Zaharias was another sports pioneer who had a battery of prejudices to
deal with after bursting onto the scene as a Wonderwoman of Olympic
athletics, then turning her hand to a legendary career on the world's
golf circuit. Writer and performer Jennifer Barclay uses the voices of
key players in this extraordinary life - including that of Babe herself
- to recreate her teenage years overcoming small-town attitudes to
become the "world beating girl viking of Texas" but still having to
tackle a male-dominated profession aghast at seeing the playing fields
depriving kitchens of the fair sex. She married a boxer who became her
manager and fell into an unlikely menage with a youthful female golfer
before battling cancer. Accents are not Barclay's strong point (Babe's
Norwegian mum sounds Yiddish Ghanaian) and her material is often
irritatingly coy, but her infectious delivery more than makes up for
Jay Paul Skelton's static direction while her respect for her subject
shines through.Though uncomfortable with (screaming) lesbian undertones
and issues of sexism, this is a delightful, sometimes ironic tale even
if a tad too apple pie. Nick Awde

The
Complete Lost Works of Samuel Beckett as Found in an Envelope
(Partially Burned) in a Dustbin in Paris Labeled "Never to be
performed. Never. Ever. EVER! Or I'll Sue! I'LL SUE FROM THE GRAVE!!!"Assembly
In between writing the title and the lengthy Beckett Foundation
disclaimer that takes up half the programme notes, co-creators Greg
Allen, Ben Schneider and Danny Thompson somehow found the time to get
this together ­ and thanks to their comic efforts, the audience gets to
join in the joke. Po-faced presenters Thompson and Bill Coelius
reverently describe their momentous discovery of the above-mentioned
Beckett scripts. Interrupted only by a flurry of legal writs, our
literary archaeologists introduce then recreate these lost works with
mind-numbing awe, aided by Schneider as the hapless actor in thrall to
bizarre utterances and unlikely props. Literary allusions abound but
knowing your Krapp from your Godot is not the point. Marvel therefore
at the playwright's first ever offering, a fluffy puppet show penned by
the nascent seven-year-old genius, and be moved by his last, the
posthumously penned and bewigged Foot Falls Flatly - a wicked
masterpiece of minimalism. Though it unravels somewhat by the end,
under John Clancy's direction this is such an original comedy that even
the late Beckett would not sue - he'd be too busy cacking his shroud
with laughter. Nick Awde

Crash Diet and Other SinsGreyfriarsA troupe
of North Carolinians with a strong sense of folk realism perform
adaptations of their favourite American writers. You'd be forgiven for
thinking it's a touch rarefied but in fact this is a perfect if
eclectic blend of storytelling and drama. Other Sins kicks off, culled
from the writings of novelist Clyde Edgerton, in which a bemused
Preacher (Chris Chiron) launches into a hilarious retelling of Genesis
before Preacher Crenshaw (Matthew Spangler) describes his temptations
before the vision of femininity that is local waitress Cheryl (Hannah
Blevins). Accompanied by guitarist Bill McCormick, Chiron provides
light relief with Playing the Devil's Banjo, a raucous paean to
self-pleasurement. The barbed Dinner with Preacher Gordon is another
Edgerton vignette where Andrea Powell enacts the genteel politicking of
guests around the local minister's table, while in The Mountain
Whippoorwill Paul Ferguson's dodgy fringe does not detract from a
rousing rendition of hillbilly duelling fiddles penned by folk poet
Stephen Vincent Benet. Concluding is Crash Diet, a more contemporary
tale adapted from a Jill McCorkle story, where Sandra (Sarah Whalen) is
caught in the crossfire between her expanding waistline, the prized
Mazda of philandering husband Kenneth (Spangler) and his love interest
Maria Chrysanthou. Oddball but very funny. Nick Awde

Daddy Take Me To The FunfairPleasance Veteran
monologuist Jack Klaff's earlier pieces were marked by a polish and
precision that may have felt mechanical to some, perhaps even the actor
himself, since his more recent work has swung a pendulum to the
opposite extreme. This rumination on life, death, truth and human
connections is assertively unpolished, to the extent of veering toward
the incoherent. In the persona of a film-maker reading his diaries,
Klaff sets off on a rambling stream-of- consciousness that involves
interrupting himself, circling back on himself, starting stories or
parables that he either never finishes or never draws a moral from,
jumping from subject to subject seemingly at random. Along the way some
moving things are said about the naturalness of death, the loneliness
of living and the value of making contact, but they are all-but-lost in
the jumble. It may be that Klaff has carefully constructed the illusion
of disorganisation to capture what he sees as a realistic portrait of
mental processes. But one gets the impression that he has fallen into
the trap of relying on his considerable personal charm as a performer
to carry him and his audiences through an underwritten and
underprepared show. Gerald Berkowitz

Rhys Darby is the Neon
OutlawGilded BalloonNo
he isn't. Not-ready-for-prime-time Kiwi comic Darby stretches a very
small quantity of material very thin, his occasional strong effect all
but lost in the fits and starts. His best one-liner involves a one-way
street that's also a dead end, an image that unintentionally haunts the
show as he repeatedly opens a new comic subject, finds nothing there,
and awkwardly drops it to try again elsewhere. The adventures of a New
Zealand country lad in London (none, actually), a visit to a brothel
(nothing happened), and an encounter with a mermaid (peters out with a
weak punchline) all seem ideas for comic material that he hasn't
actually written yet, while a number of other false starts are
abandoned even before it's clear where he was going. Darby does have
considerable charm, and an impressive facility for making mouth noises,
from cars and doors through music and underwater speech, and he might
do better to give up the attempts at conventional observational humour
and build an act around his strengths. Gerald Berkowitz

Dead LandlordGilded Balloon Teviot Family
Curioso's short comedy is a frustrating example of immense creativity
dissipating through lack of focus and firm direction. In whiteface and
rags like Eastern European theatre clowns, the actors depict a rambling
story about tenant-landlord relations that is really just the peg to
hang a lot of more-or-less inspired clowning on. A man takes a bite out
of a banana and then uses the rest as a working telephone. A landlord
runs a rigged quiz show to determine how much rent his tenant owes.
Somehow World War One gets reenacted. There's a lot of Marx Brothers
type absurdism, and almost as many gags work as don't. But too many
just peter out or are left as unresolved set-ups, and the whole thing
has a self-indulgence that desperately needs curtailing by a firm
director. Gerald Berkowitz

Deep Throat Live On StageAssembly
The world's most famous pornographic film is the basis of this
deceptively simple-seeming account written by Simon Garfield and
performed by Alex Lowe and Katherine Parkinson. What is presented as
merely a retelling of the background, notoriety and aftereffects of the
1972 film becomes a complex evocation of the odd mix of innocence and
sleaze that made up the 70s The premise is that the film's co-star and
porn legend Harry Reams has been reduced to performing a nightclub act
about his career, much like DeNiro in Raging Bull. Assisted by
Parkinson's showgirl, he tells how a nice Jewish boy got into porn and
how Deep Throat made international stars out of him and Linda Lovelace.
Lovelace's later revelation that she had been beaten and abused into
performing, and Reams' own decline into obscurity end the tale. What
raises the piece above documentary is the frame of Reams' act, which,
under Ed Dick's subtle direction, is appropriately shoddy and
cringe-inducing, conveying the sad air of talentless desperation that
the narration attempts to deny. The images of both Saturday Night Fever
and Grease are specifically invoked in the play, which transcends its
nominal subject to offer a picture of the darker side of the Travolta
decade. Gerald Berkowitz

Rob Deering - The FactsPleasance
The title of Rob Deering's new show says it all as he bravely puts his
knowledge to the ultimate test ­ the comedy crowd. Guided by a backdrop
of projected graphics, the audience is invited to call out their
choices at random from ticklists of significant topics ­ art, politics,
pop music, the future... Then everyone waits to see if the comic's done
his homework as he reels out fact after related fact like a living,
walking, talking Trivial Pursuit jukebox. It's a bit of a lucky dip:
'food' triggers an uneventful ramble about Quorn and fungus, 'family'
prompts an entertaining comparison of family likenesses while 'drink'
has him reaching for the guitar and knocking out a quick ditty before
passing around remarkably strong vodka martinis. The delivery's not as
sharp as it can be and the clown side is sometimes overplayed, but the
format frees him up to introduce not only any subject but any style ­
gags, visual puns, observation, audience participation, politics,
songs, even a rummage through the archives that produces videoclips of
TV appearances by the younger Deering on ancient quiz shows Crack It
and 15 to One. Nick Awde

Diarmuid and Grainne Assembly
Dublin's Passion Machine Theatre translates a folk tale of Finn mac
Cumaill's runaway bride into modern terms in a production that is
amusing and inventive for at least three-quarters of its length, until
an excess of theatrical cleverness threatens to sink it. In director
Paul Mercier's adaptation Fionn (Denis Conway) is a gangster lieutenant
hoping to insure his inheritance of the gang by marrying the boss's
much younger daughter Grainne, played by Emily Nagle. But the somewhat
ditsy girl loves Fionn's bodyguard Diarmuid (Eanna MacLiam) and kidnaps
him, beginning a cross-Ireland chase that involves the constantly
shifting intentions and allegiances of Fionn, her father and rival
gangs. The play thus takes on elements of Bonnie and Clyde, The
Godfather and even the Marx Brothers, as high passion alternates with
low farce, and menacing gangsters are likely to turn into backing
chorus boys whenever the heroine is moved to burst into song. Very
inventive and fast-moving staging always threatens to teeter into
chaos, and unfortunately does near the end, when an extended wordless
sequence is so difficult to follow that it can be over before you
realise that one of the major characters died somehow along the way. Gerald
Berkowitz

Dr. Bunhead's Kamikaze Cowpats
George Street Theatre
He says "poo" and "fart" a lot, he sets gasses on fire, and he makes a
lot of things go bang, so the kids are happy; and he sandwiches in the
occasional sentence explaining in the proper scientific language what
all this has to do with the digestive system, so the parents convince
themselves that it's an educational experience. And whether the kids
even notice, much less understand much of the scientific stuff, and
whether all the bangs really have much to do with the digestive system
is subject to question. Or maybe it doesn't matter. The kids see him
pump something into a hot water bottle (liquid nitrogen, actually - by
that point in the show he's given up all pretense of talking about
bottom burps and is just blowing things up for the fun of it), and
along with the explosion they carry away the memory that they saw some
stuff do that. And so when they run into nitrogen again ten years from
now in chemistry class, perhaps some bells will ring. Tom Pringle plays
Dr. Bunhead as a cross between a mad scientist and a TV presenter,
which is to say as a grown-up kid with lots of neat toys and not a
whole lot of grown-up seriousness. And he blows things up for a living.
It would be enough to make any kid want to be a scientist.
Gerald Berkowitz

Dorothy's FriendsC The
Wizard of Oz gets a catty upgrade as Kansas becomes contemporary Essex
where the tornado's an internet maelstrom and the search for the Wiz is
now the coming out of the closet metaphor it may always have been.
Dorothy is a young man who senses he is not quite as other men are.
Sucked up by his PC, he finds himself in 'Soho City', slays the Wicked
Bitch, dons a dress and ruby slippers, and picks up slutty Scare-Ho,
yuppy Tin-Woman and wideboy Lion. Created by Fruit of the Womb's Nina
Lemon and Kate Plumb, this spunky reworking is imaginative but overlong
and not half as camp or subversive as it would like to be. The
performers tend less to musical and more to comedy but work their
tushes off in every department - Nathan Guy in particular makes a
sympathetic Dorothy while Chris Jones is gloriously OTT as the
Sorceress. Though the plot runs out of steam, the music keeps things
pumping to the climax thanks to Greg Patmore's bubbly melodies and
lyrics that are acid or winsome as required. Indeed, I can only shower
with golden praise a show that dares to rhyme 'worms' with 'sperms'. Nick
Awde

Keith Dover - The Ustinov
FilesPleasance
Keith Dover's lary builder-plumber is a man who takes lip from no one
and whose knowledge of West End theatre and the Arsenal are equally
encyclopaedic. After breaking up a brawl between Peter Ustinov and a
Belgian fan during a disastrous Gunners away match in 1984, a fruitful
relationship strikes up between the two. It becomes more Peter's
friends since Ustinov is a portal to the upper echelons of theatrical
aristocracy. Dover's East End posse of white van men, decorators and
fitters welcome the actors as fellow members of the service industries
- and the stars readily turn to them for advice on life skills, be it
acting technique, choice of boiler or whether to glass 'old gitface'
Steven Berkoff . To Dover's chagrin, however, they don't always listen,
viz Helena Bonham Carter trying to nick his chicken Kiev, Ian McKellen
failing to grasp simple role research, Alan Rickman's kitchen-fitting
standards, or paintballing with Simon Callow. If you can follow the
wall to wall references it helps, but Dover's awesome research is
tempered by infectious delivery and laconic Cockney humour that keep
things firmly grounded and the audience well hooked.Nick Awde

Dust to DustAssembly
Mick fell down the stairs - pissed probably - and now he's dead. The
surprisingly unsurprising news does the rounds at his local and, in the
absence of any nearest and dearest, a trio of those who sort of knew
him find themselves looped into mourning their dear departed drinking
buddy. As they lurch from boozy brawls to soul-searching lucidity then
back again, loss turns to rejection to resolution as Robert Farquhar's
wry comedy avoids every cliché while laying out a few home truths in a
slowburner that keeps you hooked to the end. Julie Riley is Mick's
fiery ex-wife Holly who struggles to contain a wounded heart that is
constantly provoked by Ron Meadows' caustic yet equally vulnerable
Henry. Between the two flits the meek but well meaning Kev, played with
winsome sympathy by Warren Donnelly. Director Sarah Thornton
sensitively meets the challenge of this unusual pilgrimage to create a
vibrant narrative enhanced by simple staging - courtesy of the
ensemble's effortless minimalism ­ that creates sweeps of space and
time while preserving a gossipy intimacy. Nick Awde

Ebony and IronyUnderbelly
If comedy was the new rock'n'roll, it's now reached that mid-seventies
bloated Las Vegas phase. So it comes as a surprise to discover two new
hard-edged faces on the scene who look as if they could kick things
into the next generation. Irony appears in the form of Russell Howard
whose boy band persona lasts only up to the point he opens his mouth.
Tempering his vitriol with tales from the underbelly of Britain, he's
unafraid to admit how crap he was in getting away from a mugger or what
his girlfriend really thinks of him ­ best of all is his violent dad's
inverted Tourette's syndrome. Representing Ebony but equally ironic is
Matt Blaize, a East Ender who prowls the stage in search of answers. As
a Black Briton he hits the race angle with incisive humour then
unleashes a battery of hard-hitting people observations before pausing
for a truth game which gets the audience sweating. In between there's a
thoughtful political viewpoint that could easily become a show within a
show. Both natural comics, these are two guys with personalities to
match their potential. Now all it needs is managmenent with clout to
get that working in front of the audiences they deserve. Nick
Awde

Electra Underbelly The
primary reason for seeing this youthful production of Sophocles is the
extraordinarily mature and powerful performance by Lydia Waine in the
title role. Deceptively fragile-looking, her Electra constantly
threatens to explode from the critical mass of energy within her.
Alternately frenzied and exhausted by her passions, with madness
playing in her eyes even at her quietest, and as frantic in joy as in
despair, she makes you believe that the wrath of the gods has been set
loose within this small human body. Since Sophocles, unlike Aeschylus,
builds the entire play around Electra's passion, Waine's performance
goes a long way toward carrying the whole show. Unfortunately, with the
notable exception of Kate Donald's strong and textured characterisation
of Clytemnestra, there is little else to this production of Decoy
Theatre to recommend it. Setting the play in Tsarist Russia adds
nothing to its meanings or resonances, and the other performances range
from adequate downward. Gerald Berkowitz

Fairly TalesCO2Outlaw
Theatre has devised the perfect panacea for showed-out theatregoers and
performers alike. Each day four scriptless actors take their chances as
the audience supplies one-word prompts for improvised stories. The
tension's high today as mischievous punters chalk up such improbable
offerings as 'croak', 'tractor', 'penguin' and 'bounce'. No problem
since the performers plunge in without hesitation to reveal impressive
instincts for a theme. As they proceed to make this most difficult of
genres look easy, their evident fun in doing so is infectious. And with
Andrew Jones' guiding format helping to spin out the imagination, there
are no misses here. Ciaran Murtagh's tale of a scientist contributing
to air safety by constructing a plane of india rubber ('bounce') is
more than chucklesome in its insane logic while Maggie Gordon-Walker's
penguin and Juliet FitzGerald's Eskimo create a bizarre epic of
cannibalism at the South Pole. Contributions don't always have to be
spoken ­ Lesley Stone's light-hearted account of a woman seduced from
the city lights to become a farmer's wife ('tractor') is graphically
illustrated by an impromptu mime from the rest of the group. Nick
Awde

Fallen Aurora Nova
In a Festival overflowing uncomfortably with 9/11 eulogies it is
appropriate that the most successful is mainly wordless, courtesy of
Gravity Physical Entertainment and fabrikCompanie, where the
breathtaking, sublimely beautiful movements of Jess Curtis' piece push
the metaphor of falling and gravity into every aspect of our lives.
Subtitled "a visual poem of weight in space", an empty, evocatively
sidelit space reveals outlines of splayed bodies, like a police crime
area. The performers fit themselves to these shapes, then enter an
outwardly spiralling mosaic of dance and movement where falling is the
constant theme. The outlines are made of flour and their gradual
disintegration and dispersal lends the stage and performers a ghostly
hue as they writhe across the ground. Curtis, Sabine Chwalisz, Wolfgang
Hoffman, Anise Smith, Sven Till form a tight, confident combo whose
fluidity and awareness of each other is remarkable. Driving it all is
Matthias Herrman's music, summoning an entire orchestra from a single
cello and electronic effects as he attacks his instrument with a
battery of manic doublestops and legato harmonics, underpinned by
beatbox rhythms. Nick Awde

Fear of FannyGarageBrian
Fillis' thoughtfully comic look at the life and career of TV cooking
instructor Fanny Cradock gives a balanced image of her achievements and
frailties in a package that is ultimately as light as any of her
souffles. The play's premise is that Cradock's hard-edged harridan
image was invented for the camera, to make for interesting television,
but that, like partner Johnnie's amiable vagueness, it grew out of
something within her, so that eventually she could no longer turn it on
and off at will. That, along with a few scandalous biographical facts,
is as dark as the play gets, the general tone being amiable pleasure in
the progress of her rise and fall, while the play also reminds us of
how very much of what a whole generation of British housewives knew
about food selection and preparation came from this dedicated teacher
who ironically could only communicate by feigning contempt for her
students. Under Andrew Fillis' direction Caroline Burns Cooke lets us
see the serious cook, the ambitious businessperson, the harridan and
the woman beneath, without any of these negating the others. But it is
David Slack as Johnnie who repeatedly steals the show, conveying the
laid-back and bemused contentment that made him the real backbone of
the partnership. Gerald Berkowitz

Fern
Hill Assembly Rooms (Reviewed
last year)
Guy Masterson, whose solo recitation of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood
has been a popular fringe staple in past years, now turns his attention
to some of Thomas's other works, in a programme which is just as
impressive and is likely to be just as successful a touring piece.
Masterson is a very dynamic performer, with a style ideally suited for
Thomas's kaleidoscopic prose pieces, like Holiday Memory in which we
see an entire beach scene and population through a boy's eyes. With
something new leaping into consciousness every few words (Thomas loves
cataloguing lists of sights, sounds, smells), Masterson instantly and
briefly transforms himself into the person or thing being described and
just as instantly becomes the next. While this occasionally comes
closer to charades than acting - "He walked [mimes walking] up [points
up] the hill [gestures diagonal]Š" - it is both fascinating and very
evocative of Thomas's Breugal-like scenes. The similar Visit to
Grandpa's and Christmas Memory are equally alive and evocative in
Masterson's performance, while a selection of poems is recited more
starkly and simply. Thomas fans will be delighted, while newcomers will
want to run out and read the originals, with Masterson's image forever
associated with the words. Gerald Berkowitz

FirefaceGilded
Balloon Marius
von Mayenburg's short play is a study in the seeming impossibility of
surviving adolescence, but in the hands of the Gilded Balloon's Studio
Ensemble it may be even heavier going for the audience than for the
characters. While his sister revels in her escape from childhood, a boy
finds puberty deeply disturbing and takes refuge first in an incestual
intimacy with her, then in random acts of arson that escalate
self-destructively, finally in an open and murderous madness that
contaminates his sister as well. Meanwhile their parents and the girl's
boyfriend spend most of the play either oblivious, in denial, or
impotently hand-wringing. The script, as translated by Maja Zade, is
overwritten rhetorically, with all characters prone to effusive but
semi-coherent speech-making, but underdeveloped psychologically, with
none of the figures more than a thin cliche and no real insight offered
into the boy's psychological journey. Acting ranges from barely
adequate to embarrassingly poor, with direction shapeless and
rhythmless, so that the play drags through ninety minutes that feel
much longer. Gerald Berkowitz

Alan FrancisGilded Balloon
A character comedian who offers a series of sketches in different
personae rather than a stand-up monologue, Alan Francis is a bit out of
place in the stand-up world and, judging from this performance, has
difficulty guiding audiences into the mindset to appreciate what he's
doing. His characters tend to be life's losers - a thirty-year-old Star
Wars fan resenting a friend's treasonous involvement with a girl, a
pensioner bargaining down the cost of a take-out meal, a lavatory
attendant trying to convince himself he's as happy as the people he
reads about in celebrity magazines. The lav attendant sketch raises a
few chuckles, as does a more energetic one about a desperate stately
home owner begging money from English Heritage. But for the most part
Francis's act is either pearls before swine or simply the wrong show
aimed at the wrong audience, and his talent, which lies more in writing
than performance, might find warmer reception in a different form.Gerald
Berkowitz

The Frog PrinceAssembly
Rooms David
Mamet's wistful fairy tale begins in familiar fashion as a prince
offends a witch and finds himself transformed, but then wanders into
new and sobering territory. The maiden he hopes will kiss him becomes
his best friend instead, the human world becomes less appealing from
his new perspective, and when the inevitable ending is reached, it is
not as happy as the genre would seem to demand. New York's 78th Street
Theatre Lab underplays the piece, giving it a contemporary feel. While
Karen Michelle Wright as the maiden and Jonathan Uffelman as a loyal
servant make the most of their more conventional roles, Toby Wherry's
Prince might be a modern New Yorker, mildly egotistical and
presumptuous but good at heart, and it is a nice touch that he retains
some of his blokeish attitude even as a frog. But this frog is capable
of learning the values of friendship, gratitude and humility, so that
his modest complaint at the end that his punishment was excessive
carries a lot of weight. But, Mamet is reminding us, the world is not
perfect, and there's only so far that fairy tales can go - a conclusion
that children might be more comfortable with than their sentimental
parents. Gerald Berkowitz

The Gallant John-Joe Pleasance
The title character of Tom MacIntyre's play is nominally the mythic
Irish football star John-Joe O'Reilly but actually his partial namesake
J-J Conncannon, played in this solo show by veteran Tom Hickey. Our
John-Joe appears at first as a stereotypical boozy, garrulous,
self-pitying old Irish tramp, a walking cliche who interrupts his
free-flowing verbiage only for occasional singing of an anthem in
praise of the other J-J. But as his meandering monologue goes on, we
discover that Conncannon's claim on our interest and pity is more
deserved than we thought, and that the cliche surface covers a truly
and legitimately broken heart. Hickey's performance is a model of
sustaining an initially unattractive character and subtly drawing us
into him until we respect and share his pain. Gerald
Berkowitz

Gimpel the FoolCStoryteller
Saul Reichlin's presentation of the classic story by Isaac Bashevis
Singer is low-keyed to the point of transparency, virtually his only
concession to theatricality being an appropriate costume. Still, his
amiable delivery is appropriate to the character in whose voice he
speaks, the good-natured shlemiel who believes anything anyone tells
him because he can never really believe they'd have any reason to lie,
and besides, it says somewhere in the Talmud that everything is
possible. So, as he narrates with little rancour, Gimpel's childhood
was a series of pranks at his expense, and the defining event of his
adult years was marriage to a woman who repeatedly cuckolded him while
he repeatedly found her lies easier to believe than the truth. Only as
he approaches death, with the comfort that in the afterlife there will
be no lies, is there a hint of bitterness. Reichlin's respect for the
master of modern Yiddish literature is obvious, and may be the
performance's greatest weakness. The tale is something of a shaggy dog
story that makes its little point early and then lingers on, with a
serious drop in energy in the second half, and some judicious trimming
might have made a stronger theatre piece. Gerald Berkowitz

Goering's DefenceAssemblyHe was
Hitler's trusted player on the board of Nazi Germany plc and, unlike
those who believed in the system, fat cat Hermann Goering was the
system. His skill at spin and cultivated theatricality make him the
perfect subject for this slickly compelling portrait. In his cell on
the eve of his execution during the Nuremberg Trials, the former
Reichmarshall revisits the key events that led him here ­ punctuated by
his Allied prosecutors in the form of Justice Jackson, lent gravitas by
the voice of Tim Ahern. Yet what drives him is not guilt but a
consuming fear lest he be denied his place in history. Quite what that
history is becomes a subtle debate with the audience. Like a corporate
lizard he has an answer for everything. Though somewhat detached, Ross
Gurney-Randall is a convincing condemned man from whom director Guy
Masterson evokes a powerful range of emotions. And, along with Andrew
Bailey, they have created an epic script that possesses not only a
telling eye for dramatic device but also an almost poetic ear for
language. Gripping rather than chilling, it effortless achieves that
difficult triple whammy of education, entertainment and provocation.
Nick Awde

GonerAssembly
Brian Parks' very inventive, very funny comedy is - and I mean this as
a compliment - undergraduate humour of the highest order. This is the
kind of show in which every single line is a gag, every single
character a grotesque, every single plot turn a flash of absurdity, so
that the occasional dud goes by too fast to interrupt the flow of
laughter. The President of the United States (an idiot, of course) is
shot and finds himself in a hospital full of idiots. The chief surgeon
wouldn't recognise a scalpel if he saw one, his chief assistant is busy
developing a Chemotherapy Barbie doll (Her hair falls out and she
throws up), the lab head has just discovered that there are black
people in America and is off to make a documentary film to inform the
world of this, and so on. The fast-moving production and polished
performances almost disguise the fact that this is essentially an
over-extended revue sketch whose basic gags are repeated and stretched
almost to the breaking point, but it is very funny. Gerald
Berkowitz

The Government Inspector Pleasance
Gogol's satire about the visitor to a village who is mistaken for an
official and thus wined, dined and plied with bribes and willing women,
can be played as either light comedy or bitter attack on petty
corruption. The British-based but internationally-staffed Theatre de
L'Ange Fou takes the second course while also reducing Gogol's text to
merely the jumping-off point for an inventive if not always coherent
piece of physical theatre. The stage is overpopulated to the point of
crowding with grotesques who move in synchronised and choreographed
ways to communicate the essence of each emotional development, with
dialogue reduced to the absolute minimum needed as skeletal markers of
the plot. Not for all tastes, to be sure, and with many sequences
carried on far longer than necessary, to the point of self-indulgence,
but certainly one of the most polished and inventive examples of this
sort of thing that you're likely to encounter. Gerald Berkowitz

GrassC
cubed Simon
Rae's portrait of 18th century poet John Clare is an attempt to
illuminate the internal experience of a man whose talent was matched
only by his madness. The playwright's conceit is to update Clare to the
twentieth century, so that his world includes automobiles, cellphones
and the NHS, and his pastoral yearnings translate into leading
tree-saving protests against highway construction. Even the fictional
Clare's poetry takes on a hard-edged modern tone. The device is
harmless enough and may even make the character more accessible, though
uninformed audience members could be excused for thinking there was
another, modern mad poet. Rae's Clare is a sympathetic figure, witty
enough to imagine his doctor as a grinning clown of a madman and even
to enjoy their encounters, but obsessed with a girl he saw once or
twice as a youth, who has become, Beatrice-like, the fantasy love of
his life. David Keller plays Clare with an engaging combination of
amiability and intensity, rattling off the poetry attractively but also
carrying us believably through the disjointed stream of consciousness
and the uncontrolled passions of the madman. The success of both play
and performance lies not so much in explaining Clare or updating him as
in making believable the coexistence of mental disturbance and poetic
genius. Gerald Berkowitz

Rich Hall and Mike Wilmot -
Pretzel LogicAssembly
Has box-office tumescence created flaccidness in Rich Hall's comedy
department? Repeating the success of last year's mixed bag format, his
latest satire-fest with fellow conspirator Mike Wilmot is already a
sell-out but it all seems, well, a little lazy. A string of trademark
rants from motormouth Hall dissects post 9-11 United States via Dubya
and his eating habits ­ focusing on the president's now classic choking
on a pretzel routine, detailed by eccentric lifestyle guru Professor
Heimlich (as in manouevre). Meanwhile Wilmot bursts in as a
jaw-dropping Texan bigot to provoke lively debate abetted by Hall's Ku
Klux Klan hand puppet. Both are consummate comic actors as well as
stand-ups who set industry standards, but disappointingly the routines
and characters fail to gloss over the fact that things don't gel.
Perhaps they've thought too hard or simply cobbled the thing together
at the last minute. Either way, the charabang swiftly runs out of
steam. None of this matters since both come with guaranteed flop
immunity (witness the growing number of pensioners swelling their
crowds) ­ and any show named after a Steely Dan album can't be that
bad. Nick Awde

Happy NativesAssembly
Life is confusing in the modern South Africa as even those who applaud
the social changes aren't sure where the boundaries of political
correctness lie. That is the theme of this occasionally bittersweet
comedy by Greig Coetzee, performed by him and James Ngcobo. A plot
about developing a corporate entertainment to promote investment in the
country is the excuse for both to play multiple roles - the two
performers, a conservative white man trying to adjust to the new world,
a female media producer whose liberalism is wafer-thin, a black maid
unable to shake off the subservient habits of the old, an Indian
shopkeeper dubious that any real changes have happened. The two actors
don't always quite keep up with the rapid role changes, but the piece
is effectively thought-provoking while still being fully entertaining. Gerald
Berkowitz

HammerklavierAssembly
This stage adaptation by director Mark Kilmurry and performer Susie
Lindeman of Yasmina Reza's semi-autobiographical novel plays like
Reza's stage works (Art, etc.), almost a radio play in its focus on the
voice and almost total absence of visuals. Lindeman plays a musician
contemplating age, death and music in a series of disconnected scenes.
Her father's decline and death, a beloved friend's retreat into
senility, and her own ongoing relationship to ever- elusive classical
music all give her pause, even if they don't connect together into any
coherent vision. The waves of thought and emotion inspired by
encountering an old friend are real even though the person turns out
not to be the friend after all. Her dying father's embrace of an AIDS
victim he had previously shunned is one of several striking images
created entirely in words. Dressed in a microskirt and tights like a
woman who was told a long time ago that she resembled Audrey Hepburn
(though Lindeman actually looks more like Rita Rudner), and affecting a
dreadful cod-French accent that would embarrass Peter Sellars, the
actress adds little and frequently gets in the way of the author's
imagery. Gerald Berkowitz

Happy With Half Your LifeGilded Balloon Teviot Vanessa
O'Neill's semi-autobiographical monologue is a celebration of both
vital youth and wizened age, and while it may not have very much new to
say, the writer-performer's high energy and engaging personality are
irresistible. O'Neill plays a young art student turned loose in London,
revelling equally in the joys of urban life, creativity, dancing and
sex. Her life is punctuated by encounters with five older women - her
grandmother, three invalids she cares for in a part-time job, and a
friend's mother. They all strike her first with their fragility and
otherness, but gradually she sees in each a strength or beauty she does
not possess. The title, implying envy (as in "I'd be happy with...."),
ends up being relevant in both directions. O'Neill's monologue is
essentially a shaggy dog story, with no real structure or rhythm, and
you could begin to wonder whether this essentially unoriginal tale,
with its unoriginal discoveries, is really of interest. What makes it
so is less the content than the vitality and infectious joy of the
storyteller, which are more than enough to carry the fully entertaining
hour. Gerald Berkowitz

The Hare and the TortoiseNetherbow The
instant Hare and Tortoise bound onto stage to buffet each other with
fluffy toy puppets of themselves to a samba soundtrack you know Aesop's
enduring fable of misplaced rivalry is going to be a fun-filled ride.
Virginia Radcliffe (Hare) and Deborah Arnott (Tortoise) promptly launch
into all manner of madcap adventures as they count down to a frenetic
version of Wacky Races and press every chucklebutton in the process.
Delightful delays and an amazing amount of red herrings along the way
are encountered in the form of bakers, cakes, a washerwoman laundering
garments of nursery rhyme personalities plus a final leg through the
Spooky Wood. Directed by Radcliffe with Andy Cannon, and aided by
Catherine Lindow's inventive set and costumes, Hare and Tortoise's
conundrums provoke real debate amongst the younger members of the
audience, resulting in yells of support for the plodding underdog while
each new scheme hatched by her speedy rival is met with howls of
deserved suspicion. Tim Brinkhurst's music and the duo's songs slot
effortlessly into the flow of things and never drop in energy or
comedy. Nick Awde

He Died With a Felafel in
his HandGilded Balloon
The two words 'house share' evoke a wide range of emotions from
nostalgia to pure terror ­ like mullets and pierced nipples, it's
something most of us do at some point in our misguided youth. Fifth
Wall's hit comedy, hot from Australia and penned by John Birmingham,
goes some way to creating an exhaustive record for posterity of this
peculiar rite of passage. In between visits from the law, social
services, drug dealers and debt collectors, a motley group of roaming
housemates recount their various line-ups. There's the bonding, the
liggers and laggers, the I'll-have-the-rent tomorrow excuses, the
Latvian flatmate and commercial sex, the affairs, the parties, the
weeing in the fridge, the fatalities... And that's it really. The Young
Ones pales into comparison and the gross-out factor is high ­ although
taking out the four-letter words leaves you in fact with a respectable
politico-social satire. Dave Sheehan and Craig Wellington head a cast
of comic Steve Irwins that is as comfortable without the script as with
it in order to unleash a ripping good time. The laughter of
recognition, even, dare I say it, catharsis, from the audience says it
all. Nick Awde

Hell
for Boats! C VenueAn earnest Oxford student company offers this new
take on the Orestia story that unfortunately has less new to offer than
its creators might have hoped. Trapped together in a hellish rowboat,
Clytemnestra and Electra seems doomed eternally to retell and re-debate
their conflict, taking us from the mythic past of Atreus and Tantalus
through the events of the Trojan War, Clytemnestra's murder of her
husband, and Electra's vengeance. In the course of the telling the
women repeatedly switch debating roles, each taking turns presenting
her version of history from an idealised or romantic position, only to
be undercut by the other's cynical reaction. A lot of material is
covered, and those who don't know the tale might find this an easy
introduction. But anyone even vaguely familiar with the story will be
looking for some new understanding or insight into the characters, and
we don't come away from this play knowing any more about either woman
than we did going in. Gerald Berkowitz

Here Comes the Neighbourhood
Pleasance
Hot from the Boom Chicago stable, improv specialists Jordan Peele and
Brendan Hunt bounce onstage and promptly announce they're here to
resolve racial conflict in the world ­ by holding a contest and letting
the audience vote on the winner. Obviously it helps that Peele is black
and Hunt is white. Barely have they shaken hands, the contest's begun
as they launch into their first inprovised scenario set up by
suggestions taken from the crowd. For their pains they get "carjacking
teenagers", replayed over a series of scenes as kidz 'n the hood,
blaxploitation, Merchant Ivory. Things get complicated when a
supermodel and compere introduce a mini-play about "uneven breasts" and
"Mauritius' - the colour angle gets a little skewed if not lost at this
point. As things degenerate into controlled anarchy it's gratifying to
note even their keyboardist nearly electrocutes himself laughing.
Things somehow land back on the race track with Morgan Freeman
auditioning an actor for a Ku Klux Klan role. Juggling jargon, accents
and running gags like comic slot machines, Peele and Hunt are
consummate magpies who pile up the visual punchlines and barn-storming
songs and make it look as if they invented the format. Nick
Awde

Hollow MenPleasance
The place is heaving and the four Hollow Men disappoint no one as they
keep the skits and sketches coming fast and furious. There's not a duff
routine ­ cops blatantly misrecording their suspect's interrogation, a
restaurant encounter between flirts who speak a blend of Hepburn,
Coward and Mamet, the psychoanalyst curing a man's affliction of being
Scottish, the frighteningly realistic fast food morons. Running gags
keep a structure to the show fleshed out by mini soundscape links. The
team lovingly plunders Monty Python via Not the Nine O'clock News with
the odd swipe from The Fast Show. You don't have to join up the dots to
see there's a massive gap in the market - which David Armand, Nick
Tanner, Sam Spedding and Rupert Russell are filling with confident
style. They're slick and make it all seem easy but, like a comic boy
band, they do all the work for the audience. Pertinent therefore is the
fact that the mightiest surges of applause by far were for mimed
sequences of Natalie Imbruglia's Torn by a Viennese performance artist
and a berabbited Total Eclipse of the Heart. Nick Awde

Horse Country Assembly
C.J. Hopkins' two-hander has been compared to Beckett, and like some of
the master's works it probably needs repeated viewings before you can
begin to understand it or be sure the emperor isn't naked. Two men,
played with unquestionable polish and authority by David Calvitto and
Ben Schneider, sit at a table and talk compulsively, filling up time
for eternity, without even a Godot to wait for. Their dialogue ranges
from enthusiastic pep talks to ruminative speculations (We call an
assemblage of wood a chair, identifying it as a thing to sit on. But is
it the wood or the word we relate to thereafter?), including but not
restricted to a lot of topics and attitudes that are identifiably
twentieth-century American. What does it add up to? As I said, I'd have
to study it closer to be sure, and at the moment I can only confess
that I'm not sure there's anything there beyond an impressive acting
vehicle. Gerald Berkowitz

Infinite Something and the
Third MonkeyPleasance Dome
After three years of group revues, writer-performer Tim FitzHigham goes
solo while retaining the revue format of a string of loosely-connected
sketches. The theme is human history as Big Brother, with homo erectus
able to nominate neanderthal for early ejection just because he
developed speech first, and the Dark Ages imposed on the participants
as a challenge. Highlights include an Irish builder explaining why he
hasn't completed Rome in a day, William of Orange facing an immigration
officer, and a day in the life of a mayfly. While the satire is rarely
too biting, a sketch in which selectors choose George over the Bede as
England's patron saint just because he's more butch scores some telling
points. Running gags feature the Four Horsemen killing time waiting for
the Apocalypse and a series of Alan Bennettish clergymen, while the
comedian's verbal skills are displayed in a fast-talking sketch on the
impossibilities of imperial-to-metric conversions. FitzHigham's quick
changes are covered by clever prerecorded bridges, and the performer
himself is charming, versatile and fast-thinking enough to provide a
far more satisfying hour than most stand-up comics. Gerald
Berkowitz

Neil Innes and John Dowie -
Ego Warriors Traverse
Neil Innes and John Dowie combine talents in a late-night hour that is
easy, comfortable and edge-less, with no surprises for their fans and
nothing difficult for newcomers to like. Innes carries the bulk of the
show with a series of mildly comic songs such as Eye Candy, about how
easy it is for a couch potato to be sucked into the TV. The most
dangerous he gets is a subtly wicked Elton John parody at the
keyboards, all the more effective because he doesn't announce it as
such, but lets us discover the satire as he does it. In the same
spirit, the Beatle parodies in a medley of Ruttles songs are just there
for us to find and chuckle at. Dowie punctuates the music from time to
time by reading from a notebook full of his whimsical Milliganesque
poems, his one extended set being a light and touching evocation of his
Birmingham childhood. Perhaps more suited for a smoky coffeehouse than
a theatre space, the programme is gentle and ephemeral to the point of
almost disappearing before your eyes while it's going on. Gerald
Berkowitz

IntimacyAssemblyHanif
Kureishi's 1998 novel depicts a married man gathering up his energy and
courage to leave his wife, either - as he claims - because their
relationship has simply died or - as the novelist suggests - simply
because he is infatuated with another woman. Guy Masterson has adapted
it for the stage as an almost uninterrupted internal monologue for the
man, compelled to justify and explain himself to us, to a handful of
other characters, and to himself. Unfortunately, what works in a novel,
where the author has time to establish the character and guide us
gradually toward insights, plays as whining, whingeing self-absorption
to the nth degree, and neither actor Riz Meedin nor directors Susannah
Pack and Oliver Langdon can make him anything but annoying.
Gerald Berkowitz

The Invisible Bob ShowGilded Balloon This
four-actor revue is modest even by the standards of mid-afternoon
shows, stretching a limited amount of familiar material unusually thin.
Almost half the show, in bits and pieces, is devoted to a running gag
about which of the men - supposedly smooth Gary Drabwell, shy Julian
England or laid-back Russell Pay - will be the first to score with
seductive but ultimately unavailable Lizzie Roper. But there's no real
payoff to the extended setup, which thus seems mere padding. A sketch
about dubbing a porn film has some original touches, but I'm prepared
to bet there are a few more designer-baby sketches in town, while men
treating preparations for picking up girls as a military operation
appear in at least one revue every fringe, and the version here offers
no new twists on the cliche. Two other sketches are built on exactly
the same joke, of a woman being condemned not for her promiscuity but
for her bad taste in partners. The hour passes quickly but contains too
little to satisfy any but the least demanding. Gerald
Berkowitz

Iron Traverse
Rona Munro's new play is a strong character study that repeatedly foils
expectations and thus tells us more than we expected about characters
we thought we could pigeonhole. Fay (Sandy McDade in a subtly
multi-textured performance) is in prison for life, for killing her
husband. Out of the blue comes a visit from Josie (Louise Ludgate), the
daughter she hasn't seen in 15 years. But what we then get is neither
recriminations nor instant bonding. Josie wants help remembering a
childhood she has blocked, and Fay wants some sense, however vicarious,
of life outside. So a delicate bargain is reached - this bit of the
past in return for doing that between visits and describing it.
Inevitably, we eventually learn about the murder, which proves both
believable and banal, and inevitably the women reach the limits of
their ability to connect. There are also strong performances by Helen
Lomax and Ged McKenna as sympathetic but clear-eyed guards. The play is
quiet and sedately paced, but delivers. Gerald Berkowitz

JimeoinAssembly Rooms The
popular Irish-Australian comic has reached the enviable stage in his
career in which he really doesn't have to be funny. He is funny much of
the time, but his audience comes in so primed to enjoy themselves that
even incidental interruptions like losing his place or scratching
himself get laughs. Indeed, he can make a reference, as to a nursery
rhyme, and openly state that he has nothing funny to say about it, and
still get a laugh. His material is entirely observational, without a
single self-contained joke or even many obvious cappers or punch lines
to the hour. Still, he can go on at length about such mundane matters
as changing a light bulb or shopping in the supermarket, finding humour
in each new turn of thought. Shorter riffs, on why Americans laugh more
than the Irish, or on the dance moves of boy bands and backup singers,
effectively punctuate the longer pieces. His mode throughout is low-key
but confident, more like the most entertaining guy at the dinner table
than the polished performer and skilled audience-controller he really
is. Gerald Berkowitz

Kebab! The Musical Pleasance
This perky vest-pocket musical from Belly Rub Productions - no cast
list or credits available - is a modestly inventive hour presented with
the sort of broad playing, large cast and general chirpiness that
recall the best of school theatricals. A pizzeria owner who fancies
himself a mafia don favours one son over the other, and the neglected
boy leaves to seek his fortunes elsewhere. He encounters the daughter
of a kebob shop owner and is converted to the new cuisine until plot
developments and some fusion cookery effect a reconciliation. While
plotting and characterisation are elementary, the dialogue is
frequently quite clever. The music is pleasant, with occasional witty
quoting from Lloyd Webber and others, the singing and dancing are
sprightly, the hero is attractive, most of the acting is broad and
amateurish. Friends and family of the cast will have a wonderful time,
and others will find it a harmless time-filler. Gerald
Berkowitz

Kiss of LifePleasance
Dome Chris
Goode is a nice man. Before his show even starts he asks us how happy
we are, and throughout he projects an amiable, attractive air. And this
invites us into his solo play and its ultimately life-affirming
message. We meet his character on a bridge ledge, gathering up his
nerve to jump, only to be pushed by a passer-by and then saved by a
character who is himself suicidal. As our hero and his new friend bond
and even become lovers, his repeated efforts to foil the other guy's
repeated attempts to kill himself help him rediscover the value of
life. That may sound preachy, but in performance it is frequently
comic; and if the piece goes on a little bit longer than it ideally
should, it is a warm and pleasant journey. Gerald Berkowitz

Kit and the Widow - Les
Enfants du ParodyStage by StageKit
and the Widow start their show on an uncharacteristically political
note with a Camp X- Ray samba and the obligatory George W. Bush satire.
But they quickly revert to their usual mode of channelling Flanders and
Swann with songs about caravan owners, shooting parties, and posh
Londoners holidaying in Cornwall. An Edith Sitwell rap and a bossa nova
about a suntanned lad soaking up the carcinogens score high, as does
the song that manages to satirise the book, the film and the cult of
The Lord of the Rings all in one go. Kit hits more serious notes with
the sweet song of a father's prayer that his newborn daughter be spared
such dangers as "meningitis, men in cars," and with a very Sondheimish
anthem of hopeful youth, while the Widow's songs questioning the
contents of oxtail and bird's nest soup return things to the duo's
usual light tone. The hour ends with a delighted audience singing along
to Nessun Dorma lyrics drawn from an Indian menu. Gerald
Berkowitz

Daniel KitsonPleasance
Bespectacled, overweight, with unruly hair and a vaguely tweedy look,
Daniel Kitson resembles an ineffectual maths tutor, and indeed his
stage persona and comic material are built on his total lack of cool.
He talks about not drinking, not clubbing, not being good at parties or
sex. He warns of the dangers of cursing in front of your grandparents,
and describes wandering into a pro-cannabis protest march more-or-less
by accident. He talks about his lisp and his stutter, and nervously
adjusts his eyeglasses more often than Rodney Dangerfield fiddles with
his tie. Even his stories of losing a gig on a matter of principle and
of dealing with an angry heckler are double-edged, as he seems pleased
not so much to have triumphed as survived. But a running theme of his
low-key act is the danger of rash first impressions, and Kitson is not
as harmless as he looks. Woe betide the innocent audience members who
cough, sneeze or giggle at the wrong moment, as they will find
themselves the comic targets of the next three minutes' biting
ridicule. Gerald Berkowitz

Lags Pleasance
A young female drama teacher comes to a men's prison to offer
improvisation classes to the inmates. Ron Hutchinson's play
deliberately flirts with dramatic cliche, to the extent of peopling the
classroom with a predictable cross-section of prisoner types, but then
repeatedly confounds expectations in dramatically complex and
thought-provoking ways. The girl, played by Emma Fildes, is no naif,
but street-smart and impressively courageous. The inmates are neither
rehabilitated instantly nor totally unmoved, but are affected in the
small ways one can believe might happen in the single session shown.
The joker in the bunch (Laurence Saunders) finds new outlets for his
energy, the mousy coward (Nick de Mora) gets to express some of his
anger, the hard man (Michael Aduwali) lets slip a veiled hint of
ambitions for self-expression. And even as these small victories are
called into question by the cynical but insightful guard played by
Claire Cogan, the play insists that something, however small, has
happened to these men's lives that will remain with them. Caroline Hunt
skilfully directs a production that combines subtlety with high energy.
Gerald Berkowitz

Latin!Gilded
Balloon TeviotStephen
Fry's puff pastry of a public school satire is given an appropriately
knowing production by Activated Image, with Mark Farrelly and Tom Noad
clearly and infectiously enjoying themselves in the roles of the Latin
master caught in a forbidden affair with a boy and the rival master not
above a little kinky blackmail himself. Fry's signature combination of
naughty-boy shockingness and delightfully plummy writing translates to
the stage with complete success, with audiences quickly attuning
themselves to a pattern of Freudian slips of the tongue or chalk, and
director Adam Barnard adding their equivalents in visual humour. But as
inventively decadent as the plot scenes are, the real fun for many in
the audience will lie in the milieu-setting sequences, as Farrelly
turns the theatre into his Latin class in order to browbeat and insult
individual students, or Noad gives a parents' day lecture explaining
absurd but immediately recognizable school traditions. Gerald
Berkowitz

David Leddy's On the EdgePleasance DomeThere was
once a period when mysterious killings threatened to cull Britain's
upper classes during the inter-war years. Thankfully documented for
posterity by Agatha Christie and others, David Leddy's inventive
one-man show now invites us to wipe our feet as we cross the threshold
of murder most horrid. Deep in Chipping-Claybourne, a Cluedo paradise
of rich unmarried ladies and retired military gentlemen, the dapper
Doctor's wife is discovered mortally stabbed. The investigating
Inspector, aided by the unimpeachable physician, lines up the
houseguests for a thorough probing - the Sapphic Spinster, the Muddled
Major, the Bright Young Thing, plus sinister Johnny Foreigner,
Blackmailing Butler and sundry salt of the earth retainers. All manner
of dark secrets emerge from the closet as the suspects whip out their
alibis and compare motives. Leddy's own motive lies in the fiendishly
clever way he constantly challenges our acceptance of stereotypes
without skipping a beat in the entertainment factor. Although there are
longueurs in the form of musical interludes, the rest sizzles with the
pure, camp joy of the genre. Definitely a killer of an evening. Nick
Awde

Like Thunder Gilded Balloon
(reviewed last year)
Niels Fredrik Dahl's play is yet another domestic drama about a family
dysfunctional through inability to face and accept truths, and while
the writing never triumphs over its soap opera elements, dedicated
performances sustain your interest and involvement until the excesses
of cliched plot and overwritten dialogue become too great a burden. A
family gathers to deal with the fact that the husband and father has
been missing for four years. One son is committed to the belief he is
still alive, another is sure he is dead, and mother just wants some
sort of arbitrary closure. Meanwhile, the brothers hate each other, one
has a bad marriage of his own, and the other is a former criminal who
has gone blind. Throw in a séance, a long buried (but telegraphed far
in advance) secret about father, and a startling but ambiguous new
revelation, and it really is more than even the most skilled playwright
could juggle successfully. Gerald Berkowitz

Looking UpAssembly
A young couple's eyes meet across the club where they work and so
begins a gentle romantic comedy with a difference. The difference being
that one of the protagonists spends much of her time hanging
upside-down. Trapeze artist Wendy and bartender Jack's mutual
attraction unfolds with much mood swinging and dissection of life, the
universe and everything. Though both are struggling to keep their feet
firmly on the ground, the slightest hint of rejection sends one
retreating into the rafters, the other to the bar. Understandable space
constraints mean there's little flying through the air yet Wendy's job
as an aerial pole-dancer demands more subtle movement so her trapeze
becomes a life metaphor where commitment and safety nets top the list.
Writer Carla Cantrelle plays the show girl past her prime who's looking
for a life outside the womb of the circus while, as the younger man,
Ben Tollefson gets the best lines - his late-night rant after a heavy
day at the bar is a mini-masterpiece. Guided by director Annie Levy's
sensitive touch, they effortlessly glide through a blend of styles and
technical challenges, and their Œwill they won't they' teasingly keeps
you guessing to the end. Nick Awde

Losing
It
Pleasance
Like a lot of men, Simon Lipson lost it before he was 30 ­ and he
admits to having some regrets. After all, going bald is a life-changing
event, one we can all relate to when viewed through his own
follicly-challenged history, subtitled A Tricho-comedy. Doomed by
genetics, Lipson takes a darkly ironic ramble through acceptance of
being a slaphead via bizarre therapy groups before regressing further
to his own family experiences and a smooth-pated father. He meanders
halfway into an evocation of growing up in the seventies which is funny
but loses the thread, regaining it by the finale thanks to a slide show
that takes a wicked dig at everything from a shaven Beckham to wig
catalogue models. Co-written with director Mark Paterson, this is a
deceptively ambitious show that frequently places Lipson at the centre
of prerecorded dialogues with other members of his discussion groups -
the timing is tricky but he hits every cue and every gag. While not the
most natural of performers, he is at ease under the spotlights and a
surprisingly gifted mimic who instantly engages the audience with the
gruff Cockney of his East End dad or any number of surprise celebrities
to produce a shaggy dog story filled with unexpected laughs. Nick
Awde

The Love at LastGilded
Balloon This
short and fragile play by Mike Bartlett and Dan Snelgrove offers a
modest and almost tentative statement about the process of dying, but
one that is both convincing and moving. With Bartlett directing,
Snelgrove plays a man in a hospital bed with some unidentified malady
whose seriousness only gradually becomes evident. A series of erotic
encounters with the nurse played by Nadine Khadr are obviously
fantasies, but the role they serve and the direction in which they
evolve are surprising, and lead to the discovery that the dying may
come to need the comfort of illusion less rather than more. Both
performers are successful in maintaining the play's double vision of
fantasy and the reality behind it, Snelgrove by treating both with the
same mix of wonder and respect, and Khadr by letting us see the shadows
of the real in the dream, as when her loving embrace resembles the
manoeuver nurses use to lift a patient. Hardly more than a dream
itself, the play's images are likely to haunt the memory as those of
dreams do. Gerald Berkowitz

Macbeth Lyceum Theatre
Continuing its tradition of importing only the most ponderous and
lifeless of foreign theatre, the International Festival offers this
almost totally affectless Dutch-language production from Rotterdam's ro
theater. Despite heavy cutting, including among others the witches'
pot-stirring, Banquo's murder scene and the line about tomorrows, Alize
Zandwijk's staging runs over two hours without interval, the extra time
provided by slow, droning recitations of most speeches and extended
silent interludes in which little is accomplished beyond the moving of
a few props. When emotion is shown, it is almost always incongruous or
in direct contradiction of the words. Duncan's courtiers punch and
shove each other like pre-teen boys, and Lady Macbeth (Jacqueline Blom,
got up like a 70s punk rocker) joins them in a wine-spitting contest at
the dinner table; she later plays what must surely be the jolliest
sleepwalking scene on record. Meanwhile Macbeth (Steven Van
Watermeulen) looks blankly at the invisible dagger as if scanning a
supermarket shelf and later reacts to the news of Macduff's untimely
birth with a oops-like "oh" that gets a surely-unintended laugh. Did
anybody here read this play? Macbeth speaks the lines comparing the
imaginary dagger with the one in his hand, but there is none in his
hand. When Lady Macbeth berates her husband for still carrying the
knives that killed Duncan, he isn't carrying them. In the final
confrontation with Macduff, Macbeth cries out his defiant determination
to go down fighting, and then lays down his weapon to let himself be
strangled. The few original touches, such as having the witches wander
through the action, drawing crime-scene-like chalk outlines where each
of Macbeth's victims fall, have no effect. A little of the play's
inherent power inevitably seeps through. But the evening is almost
totally unengaging, untragic, unilluminating of the protagonist's
mental and spiritual journey, and the greatest of theatrical sins,
boring. Gerald Berkowitz

Malice in Wonderland C too
This short play from Chatham's Changeling Youth Theatre is an
impressive piece of teenage writing and acting without ever
transcending the limits of the form. In a series of brief scenes we
encounter a couple who met on an internet chat room and have taken the
first tentative steps toward an actual romance. When an enigmatic
second boy bursts in on their chat and starts playing them off each
other, it will come as little surprise that he goes on to cause more
trouble or that they have to do some quick growing up survive him.
Author Neil Carter plays the boy, Amie Mercer the girl and Samuel
George Carey the troublemaker, all with enough strength to make the
play's fairly simple point - be careful online - effective for the
intended audience. Gerald Berkowitz

Men in Coats Pleasance
The movie Quadrophenia started the process but it has taken Men in
Coats (and South Park) to finish the job in reinstating the lowly
parka. Accordingly attired, the duo lovingly plunder vaudeville and
music hall to produce a winning silent blend of sight gags, mime and
clown theatre. There's not a gag that's less than a century old but it
all seems newly invented thanks in part to the fact that they radiate a
humour lacking in their European counterparts and an earthy surrealism
missing in the Americans. You'll find disembodied heads and ducks -
well, disembodied everything unless it's truncated, elongated or sliced
in two - while running jokes include Kenny and cheeky horse heads
accompanied by a driving soundtrack of every cheesy big band samba and
sixties/seventies soundtrack you can think of (and yes, there's a
Mission Impossible sequence plus The Godfather and Vision On). Being
self-referential is not off-limits nor are bodily emissions, and any
roughness around the edges is merely proof you're watching real theatre
and not a sideshow at Disneyland. And so the Men hit that rare
achievement of keeping everyone happy via the highest common
denominator. Nick Awde

MessengerC3There's a
genre of play that involves a man (it's always a man) waking up in a
psychiatric ward not knowing how he got there. Sometimes he knows his
name, mostly he knows little else until syringe-wielding doctors and
barking inmates prod him from amnesia to the dawning that nothing is as
it seems. It could happen to you. Writer Andrew Shepherd has taken all
these ingredients and more to create a thoughtful play that is more O
Lucky Man! than Kafka and remarkably free of the self-indulgent
philosophising that usually distinguishes such apocalyptic works. His
protagonist is John Messenger, an articulate, sensitive man haunted by
dreams and visitations no one can see - or can they? Questioning by the
medical staff, assailed by the passion or aggression of the other
patients, he slowly pieces together his fragmented past towards the
revelation of a dark secret. As Messenger, Colin Hardy heads a focused
ensemble that goes for maximum effect with the minimum of props, while
director Anna Ostergren keeps the pulse of each performer firmly on the
emotional output, driven by Al Sarafaglou's moody soundtrack. Nick
Awde

Mort C VenueTerry Pratchett's black-comic fairy tale has been
adapted by Stephen Briggs into a potentially entertaining 90-minute
play that Wonderland Theatre do not do justice to. Pratchett imagines a
lad named Mortimer apprenticed - appropriately, given his nickname - to
Death, he of the black cloak and scythe. While his boss takes his first
night off in millennia, Mort fouls things up, sparing someone who
should die, and thus screwing up the course of history. At this point
you might lose interest in the plot, as Pratchett himself seems to,
since the real fun is in the quite witty jokes he colours the story
with. Seen at their first performance, the clearly under-prepared cast
offer a catalogue of bad acting, either mumbling incoherently or
overacting grotesquely, and most of the jokes are lost in bad delivery
or timing. There's nothing wrong with this show that another three
weeks of rehearsal and a stronger directorial hand couldn't cure, and
it might be worth visiting toward the end of the Festival.Gerald
Berkowitz

Mrs. ShakespeareRoman Eagle Lodge
Bridget Wood has adapted Robert Nye's novel into a solo show that is a
harmlessly pleasant hour for the undemanding, but tells us little that
is believable or enlightening about either the playwright or his wife.
Speaking to us as widow, the former Anne Hathaway is presented as one
with no understanding or appreciation of her husband's art, a country
mouse who was perfectly happy to have him go off to the big city for
years at a time, except that he didn't always send money home.
Centrepiece of her story is a fictional visit to London in 1594. She
hated the town, but remembers a sex-filled week of role-playing games -
we were the children of feuding families, he was a black general and I
was his unfaithful wife, and so on, through the yet-to-be-written
canon. Only a pedant like me would notice the anachronisms and
historical errors, and I wasn't bothered by them. But the story and
characterisations simply don't ring true, even as fictions, and Wood's
stolid performance does little to bring them to life. Gerald
Berkowitz

My MatisseRoman Eagle Lodge
Last year, director Andy Jordan was busy with Brian McAvera's Picasso's
Women and here he runs over similar ground with Howard Ginsberg's My
Matisse, possibly a more satisfying work in that the protagonists are
gathered on a single stage and interact to paint a more immediate
portrait of their subject. Like his rival Picasso, Henri Matisse was a
painter who declined to die young and capitalised instead on his own
reputation. Like Picasso, he was also an artist who painted with his
dick. Forever evolving in style, he "loved to paint women, only women",
i.e. only those he found attractive. And so, gathered in a colourful
tableau to compare perspectives, the defining females who describe how
they shaped his life are split into those he lusted after and those he
didn't ­ wife, mistress, model, secretary versus mother, daughter and
Gertrude Stein. A frequently overlinear script and Jordan's sedentary
direction cannot hold back mostly strong performances across the board,
reinforced by excellent casting. Unfair therefore to single out Karen
Archer for the poignant strength she brings to Amelie, Matisse's
long-suffering spouse. Nick Awde

Navelgazing Pleasance
Cheddwang Park is a cruddy theme park where "there's loads to see!" as
the manager gushes with misguided optimism and he's right - since you
get a perfect view of the more successful Alton Towers next door. Today
the new PR man is doubling as Francis the (child-frightening) Fly and,
more worryingly, the trades descriptions inspector is appraising the
attractions. In between lugubrious Tannoy announcements, radio spots
and rejection letters from celebs declining invitations to reopen the
UK's oldest working toilets, ungrateful punters wander through the
terracotta collection and dodgy Waxworks Ride. No Navelgazing live show
would be complete without a degree of graphic violence and both the
nipple losing incident and gore of the Mock Tudors minstrels fill the
quota. In a welcome return to live work, Ewen MacIntosh, Jack Brough,
Jamie Deeks and Dan Johnston create a whole world of strangeness via
trademark quips, quirks and scary comedy. The never-ending characters
means some momentum is lost but this is also the attraction ­ nearly 30
perfectly formed roles in an hour and that's not including the
voice-overs, the two corpses in the gardens and the dead asylum seeker
in the bus. Nick Awde

Phil Nichol - Things I Like
I LickPleasance This
sometimes manic comic has toned down a bit, with a little less frantic
gay innuendo and flirting with audience members than in past shows,
though those in the front row live in constant danger of being licked.
The slightly subdued nature of his current act has much to do with a
strong core of material, much of it a wryly comic account of his
tribulations of the past year, which included being arrested on a train
and punched on the underground, along with a string of medical
maladies. Other fruitful sequences include a string of jokes with the
same punch line, and a catalogue of bad taste humour culminating in a
song about being Helen Keller's fella. In that and a few other songs,
Nichol is modestly backed by guitarist Mick Moriority, and each show
ends with a different (and unpredictably effective) practical joke
played on him by a friend. The overall sense one gets is of a performer
in transition, beginning to trust his material enough to relax and not
push as hard as he sometimes feels compelled to. Gerald
Berkowitz

1933
And All That Demarco (reviewed last
year)
This recital by Anna Zapparoli of songs by Brecht, Weill and others is
all the more pleasant for being predictable - there are few songs or
poems that the fan will not have heard before on similar programmes.
But you can't hear Surabaya Johnny, the Solomon Song, Pirate Jenny and
the like too often, especially not when sung with as much grace and
intelligence as Zapparoli brings to them. Less familiar songs, like the
Brecht-Eisler Song of the Nazi Soldier's Wife and a couple by Wedekind,
are particularly welcome additions, and backing by a small band led by
Mario Borciani is strong and unobtrusive. No credit is given for the
translations, which I haven't encountered before, but they are good,
combining accuracy with singability. Gerald Berkowitz

Ross Noble - Sonic WafflePleasance While
many stand-up comics begin their acts with some direct chatter with
individual audience members, Ross Noble is the absolute master of the
quick-thinking development of a brief exchange into an extended
routine, which is then woven into his prepared material so seamlessly
that it is difficult to tell where the ad libs end. On this particular
evening one latecomer, one exuberant American and one guy carrying
drinks for his friends became the basis for extended riffs that somehow
included coasters strapped to one's knees, the absence of lockers in
British schools and (I'm really not sure how we got here) Billy Elliot
dancing in a coal mine. That last bit may have been part of the regular
material, because ballet became a running theme, along with mixed nuts
and the Dalai Lama. On the other hand, a throw-away reference to being
attacked by a drug dealer, which seemed inspired (somehow) by the
latecomer, turned out to be a carefully-planted set-up for the
evening's final joke. It's enough to make other comics just want to
give up. Gerald Berkowitz

Nothing to Declare Pleasance
A young designer clambers over the cab of her jack-knifed truck, roves
the desolate desert that surrounds it. Armed only with an out of date
map, insufficient water and colour swatches, she has come in search of
inspiration and found it - crisis chic. The only problem is that what
she has found is preparing to consume her. Visibly fading, she
defiantly reports on her situation like war correspondent from the
front line. In this bold production from Point Blank, Liz Tomlin gives
an impassioned performance of an ironic, contemporary piece that still
retains an accessible Bennett flavour. For all its promise, however, it
proves ultimately unsatisfying and it's the usual suspect since Tomlin
also directs and writes, a hat-trick that rarely augurs well for
structured theatre such as this. The direction is over-obsessed with
the poetry of movement yet ignores the dynamics of delivery - vital
laughs are lost and the build-up of tension is compromised. In the
writing department there are messages delivered as the symbolism racks
up but it all ends up running on dry. Incredibly, to achieve this it
took an additional choreographer, a dramaturg and no fewer than three
credited additional directors. Nick Awde

Oh Hello! Venue 13 Audiences
may come to Dave Ainsworth's portrait of Charles Hawtrey expecting a
joke-filled celebration of the Carry On films. But, while Ainsworth
offers a fair share of behind-the-scenes anecdotes, his solo play is
actually a moving study in decline and self-delusion. After a brief
prelude hinting at future unhappiness, we meet Hawtrey near the end of
his Carry On career, as the veteran, presented as twice as camp in real
life than either he or Kenneth Williams ever were onscreen, bemoans the
lack of respect and remuneration he is getting. He acted with Will Hay,
he repeatedly reminds us, and he takes great pride in the fact that the
young Jim Dale looks to him as a comic mentor. Over the next few years,
as Hawtrey leaves the series and sinks into alcoholic oblivion, his
backstory is also revealed as less pleasant than he first remembered
it, and we learn that he was less of a victim and more the agent of his
own downfall that he wants to believe. Appropriately, Ainsworth's
playing also becomes more subtle, engaging our sympathy for a man whose
greatest performance may have been the one he put on to deceive himself.
Gerald Berkowitz

Oleanna Assembly Rooms
Former Stage acting award winners Beth Fitzgerald and Guy Masterson
offer an intense and remarkably balanced revival of David Mamet's 1993
dissection of sexual politics. A female student who has come to a male
professor for help later charges him with a long list of sexual
prejudices and offenses and, while we know he is innocent of the
specific charges, we come to see a more subtle paternalism and
insensitivity of which he is guilty. At its best, the play can inspire
audiences to side with one character or the other in equal proportions
and, guided by director Emma Lucia, Masterson and Fitzgerald seem to
have accomplished this ideal. He plays the professor sympathetically,
emphasizing the well-meaning liberalism that accompanies his
self-blindness. While she never completely solves the text's central
conundrum - how the mousy student of the first scene turns into the
militant feminist of the rest of the play - she brings a sometimes
frightening passion to her character's confident zeal. On a bare stage,
with nothing more than two chairs and a few hand props, the author,
director and performers create one of the most emotionally intense and
intellectually challenging hours on the fringe. Gerald
Berkowitz

One Fat Lady The StandThe
seriously insane Bruce Devlin sub-subtitles his new show as the
"harrowing tale of one heroic homo's escape from Dundee" and as trade
descriptions go that's a pretty fair assessement. His is a rampant,
surreal picaresque, a rollicking run-through of his childhood and life
apprenticeship on a yellow brick road that boomerangs from deprived
Dundee to Edinburgh via Soho. Call centre hell and casting couch
contretemps conspire to deny him the stardom and media frenzy that
surely beckons. The blow-job gags and rentboy banter paradoxically
reinforce his disarming, demonic glee in demonstrating it isn't only
the straight and boring who end up in shite jobs. It all disguises a
master of observation who, while sneakily pushing the values of home,
job and hope, hits every climax and leaves no grimy detail unturned
right down to the effects of smeggy mould and facial soap. No so much
offensive as utterly shameless, Devlin takes queer humour where happy
campers fear to tread and is not for those of a nervous disposition,
yet he plays to such a brilliantly broad audience he has to be an
essential stop-off on this Fringe's comedy circuit. Nick Awde

100Underbelly
If you had to spend the rest of eternity comforted only by a single
memory from your life, what would it be? Like an existentialist Desert
Island Discs, the scenario is a well-trodden one yet here The Imaginary
Body spirits up a show that is as innovative as it is mainstream. Four
strangers are thrown together in limbo and though they have no idea how
they got there, the man who welcomes them may yield a clue or two.
Their questioning reveals more than they bargained for as he starts off
a countdown to their eternal future, in the process raising intriguing
questions about honesty and the choices we make. Armed only with bamboo
poles for props, Matthieu Leloup, Matt Boatright-Simon, Tanya Munday,
Claire Porter and Lawrence Werber weave a Zen-like definition of space
and action across the eerie expanse of this gloomy cavern that helps
keep the tension high. In a seamless, unexpected fusion of words and
movement, Neil Monaghan's sharp script resists the temptation to plunge
into whimsy while director Christopher Heimann keeps a strong current
of humour underpinning the philosophising and minimalism. A hit
undoubtedly bound for the international circuit. Nick Awde

Outlying IslandsTraverse As clouds
gather at the onset of Second World War Two, a pair of ornithologists
find themselves despatched by their ministry to a remote piece of rock
far off the Scottish coast. Their mission is to survey the island's
bird population and, though initially treated with bemused suspicion by
the island's crabby leaseholder and his inquisitive niece, the
interplay of the humans with each other and their wild surroundings
leads each to a liberation of sorts. David Greig's latest exploration
of the human condition swirls with superbly paced language, a gift that
director Philip Howard uses well, while the action finds an evocative
setting in Fiona Watt's circular pagan chapel. However, despite the
life-altering insights he experiences, Laurence Mitchell's chief
birdwatcher Robert becomes ever more one-dimensional as the events roll
on and Sam Heughan as his assistant John fares little better. Working
on safer ground, Robert Carr and Lesley Hart flesh out the islanders
with a confident, ironic grittiness. They ultimately founder because
Greig fails to deliver his grand ideas and so the themes fail to
connect for the protagonists by play's end. A gripping experience but
one that remains tantalisingly one rewrite short of the finished
product. Nick Awde

Out in the GardenAssembly
Set in a gnome-filled Birmingham garden, Carolyn Scott Jeffs' tale of
matrimonial disaster is an entertaining interplay of personal
differences with some neat social satire lobbed in for good measure.
Gregarious matriarch Denise (Rebecca Simmons) presides over the comic
time-bomb of a family gathered for the wedding of her son Stuart
(Richard Smith) to mousey Ang (Anna Barker). Arriving from London is
elder brother Alex (Gresby Nash) and partner Susan (Georgia Reece),
City sophisticates already at odds with the Midlanders. More worrying
is the presence of stranger Liam (John Pickard), last seen dashing
about in naked panic in Stuart's company. Naturally everyone has a
secret bursting to get out and the misunderstandings pile up nicely as
the wedding arrangements disintegrate. Copious drunkenness, vomit and
mobile phones lend a contemporary feel to the genre and add to the
human snarl-ups. In director Caroline Hadley's department things are a
touch over-frenetic and lack edge while Carolyn Scott Jeffs' writing
needs tightening ­ there are kinks in characterisation and key moments
are fluffed. Cavills really since there are wonderful belly laughs
along the way as some of the oldest lines in the business get a fresh
airing plus sparkling performances all round. Nick Awde

The Oxford RevueGilded Balloon
Poor. No, bad. No, lousy. This franchise, which in the past has brought
us generation after generation of university wits, hits a nadir in this
assertively unfunny, unwitty and uninspired show. There's a weak
running gag about how the town of Hove is overshadowed by its neighbour
Brighton, and a string of undeveloped ideas about frustrated love
affairs. Late in the run, they're still flubbing lines and missing
cues, with the we-know-we're-in-a-flop-so-who-cares hysteria that makes
those onstage have far more fun than the ticket buyers. And, like the
old joke about complaining that the food was lousy and, even worse, the
portions were small, I have to note that they could only come up with a
half-hour's worth of this weak material. Gerald Berkowitz

PeaceAugustines
Aristophanes
was a pretty brave guy. In the middle of a long war and in the face of
government-generated jingoism he wrote a couple of satirical pacifist
comedies. Lysistrata is of course his masterpiece, but this play at its
best does a pretty good job at sending up not only war but the whole
culture of heroism. Since the goddess of peace has fled to Olympus, and
received lore is that the only terrestrial beings that can go there are
dung beetles, our hero has to spend the first part of the play
shovelling dung to get his beetle strong enough to carry him on its
back. Then he has to deal with various comic and serious characters in
order to get to her and win her back to earth. The young actors of Anky
Park Productions have fun with the farcical dung-collecting scenes, but
far too soon their production sinks into static speech-making, some of
it dramatically strong but too little of it funny. Gerald
Berkowitz

Personal BelongingsGilded Balloon Teviot
Elbowing her way through the dodgy detritus of humanity filling up
coach D on the Edinburgh train, an aspiring actress takes her seat and
prepares for a journey that will convey her northwards to that hallowed
Mecca for thespians. Barely has the whistle gone and she is conversing
and communing with her fellow travellers ­ sex-deprived academic,
self-obsessed mother with kid, precocious teenager, ubiquitous Aussie ­
just a typical day out really. Oh, and everyone's harbouring a secret
of sorts. In this entertaining one-woman show from Live Theatre, Zoe
Lambert is a bundle of infectious energy who jumps in and out of
character and accent quicker than it takes Virgin to cancel the weekend
service. Written by Julia Darling and directed by Jeremy Herrin, there
is a tad too much technique and clever twist of phrase leading to
gradual loss of the narrator's perspective. Nevertheless, some gorgeous
surreal flights of fancy abound particularly in the form of the country
and western conductor ­ personified by a husky voiced Lambert,
accompanied by guitarist David Scott on laconic ballads such as Since I
Became Lost Property and No Such Thing as a Straight Line. Nick
Awde

Priorite a Gauche - Le Best of the Greatest Hits Queen's
Hall
Fringe favourites Jean-Francois and Didier are back dans la maison,
slipping each other haut cinqs and doing their muddled best to enhance
cross-Channel grooviness. The basic joke of a pair of
franglais-spouting French entertainers with a bit more self-confidence
than talent is a good one, and the pair of would-be Eurostars, played
this year by Justin McCarron and Arnold Widdowson, keep the multilevel
satire afloat through the eighty-minute show. From the faux-French
jokes -- a list of favourite bands that includes Toi Aussi (U2) --
through the genuinely witty material - a rap made up of the rhyming
names of great Frenchmen - the pair sustain a high energy and audience
rapport. Only occasionally does one sense the material being stretched
thin, as when an early routine built on Jean-Francois' embarrassment at
having to translate Didier's increasingly explicit French lyrics
reappears in a minor variation in the second half, or when Didier's
mastery of English rises and falls to meet the needs of each new bit.
Audience involvement, ranging from being flirted with by the amorous
Didier to being brought onstage for a wine-drinking ritual, culminates
in an enthusiastic YMCA-style sing-and-gesture-along that sends
everyone out avec les high spirits.. Gerald Berkowitz

Quasi-MurderGarage The
ugliest man in the world is a staple of literature and theatre, be his
name Quasimodo, Cyrano or Merrick, and this dramatisation by performer
Patrick Goddard of Amelie Nothomb's novel Attentat nods to each of its
predecessors. Like Merrick he is unexpectedly sensitive of soul; like
the hunchback he loves the beauty, here a warm-hearted actress; like
Cyrano, he can only express his love by wooing for a rival. The
hard-to-look-at hero revels in his revoltingness but is clever enough
to exploit it, conning the fashion world into employing him as a
shock-effect model. And when he is finally driven to violence, it takes
a form both appropriate and oddly fulfilling of his needs. Goddard
holds the small stage with the intensity of his performance, creating
the effect of ugliness with nothing more than grimaces, oversize
clothes and a sustained air of self- loathing. He is never far from one
of the cracked distorting mirrors that make up his set, making clear
that the character needs constant reassurances of his own hideousness
to energise him. Admittedly a work-in-progress, the piece will benefit
from further trimming and focussing, but its potential strength is
already evident. Gerald Berkowitz

Requiem for Ground ZeroAssembly
A last-minute addition to the fringe programme, Steven Berkoff's
ruminations on September 11 are openly a work in progress, and the
performance's variations from the published text indicate that the
author-actor continues to work on a piece whose strongest sections are
both moving and evocative. Writing in unobtrusively rhyming quatrains,
Berkoff opens with a portrait of a New York morning with only the image
of silver birds overhead spoiling a lightly comic picture. As he jumps
to Boston and the beginnings of the fatal flights, he repeatedly uses
Manhattan breakfasts as time markers, cementing the sense of
connectedness, and uses his trademark mugging and broad playing to
stress both the innocence of the soon-to-be victims and the spiritual
foulness of their murderers. The whole first section of the one-hour
piece is its strongest, with a precision of observation and imagery
that brings alive the planes' passengers (oddly forgotten in much of
the 9/11 mythos) and the human tragedy to come. Oddly, both writing and
performance lose focus once Berkoff's account reaches the towers, with
only generalised invocations of brave firemen and innocent secretaries,
though the occasional telling image, such as seeing the first crash
site as an obscene grin on the building's face, catches your heart and
breath. Text and performance reach their nadir with some cheap and
irrelevant parody of George W. Bush. It is clear that the second half
of this Requiem is most in need of further development, but if Berkoff
can shape it to the form and level of the opening section, the whole
will be one of the most powerful of 9/11-inspired works.
Gerald Berkowitz

Ride Assembly Rarely
has the morning after the night before been captured with such
exquisite, humorous agony as in Jane Bodie's romantic whodunit where,
with each eye opened, aching joint stirred, intimate garment retrieved,
the participants in a one-night stand face up to an understandably
awkward breach of etiquette. Worse, this couple went to bed strangers
and, thanks to alcoholic-induced amnesia, wake up not knowing if they
have even had the pleasure let alone who with. Hang-overs and a
curiosity to locate the spark that induced them to get naked conspire
to keep them in the bedroom and so unfolds a detective story of the
sexes as each fresh reactivation of their crumpled memory banks buffets
them in the effort to determine who conquered who, who used protection,
and whose place is it anyway. Fiona Macleod's sensible but fun-loving
waitress and Todd MacDonald's laidback writer convince on every level,
while Bodie's direction smoothly takes every advantage of the natural
chemistry so evident between the duo. The result is a sexy, intelligent
exploration of how we are truthful to ourselves, creating such a
delicious sympathy with the characters' story that we don't know
whether to laugh or cringe. Nick Awde

RoadmoviePleasanceIn
this solo show written by actor Nick Whitfield and director Wes
Williams, a video shop clerk and one of his co-workers both go quietly
mad in different ways. Bored senseless by their work, united in
contempt for the taste of most of their customers, immersed to the
point of obsession in the semiotics of their favourite films, and
frustrated film-makers themselves, their futile little lives and
free-floating anger finally become too much for them. Whitfield plays
the more passive of the two, reporting on and occasionally conversing
with his potentially violent friend. What begins as healthy grumbling
comfortingly balanced by happy thoughts like the memory of his son's
birth gradually breaks down and goes sour, a key indicator being
difficulty keeping film plots separate in his mind. Projected film
sequences, of the narrator's clumsy attempts at direction and of his
fearful reaction to his friend's breakdown, punctuate the live action.
But ultimately it needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us that
little people in dead-end jobs can be unhappy and disturbed, and the
play lingers on in a rambling and unfocused way long after it has made
its small point. Gerald Berkowitz

A Room of State UnderbellyThis
production from the Prodigal Theatre Company is a bit of a fraud, and a
missed opportunity, and that's a shame. It advertises itself as the
story of the Players in Hamlet, and you expect at least a little of the
insight, if not the wit, of Tom Stoppard in exploring what it's like to
live on the edge of someone else's great tragedy. What we get instead
is just a straight-forward, heavily condensed version of Hamlet itself,
a kind of Hamlet-Lite. On those terms, the actors don't do a bad job,
and if all you want is a one-hour plot summary of Shakespeare, you'll
get it here. But it could have been something really inventive if only
what was inside the tin was what it said on the label. Gerald
Berkowitz

The Secret Death of
Salvador Dali Assembly
Dali was the ultimate drama diva if this innovative collage from
Stephen Sewell is anything to go by. As a suspended picture frame
focuses you on a great bed upon which the masturbatory surrealist
painter lies dying but typically priapic, he is visited by a stream of
flashbacks that include his precocious sister, vampish spouse, pompous
surrealists and his own younger self. First shown in 1997, this highly
comic two-hander - to which El Joglars' larger-scale Daaali (premiered
two years later) bears an uncanny resemblance - has a thoughtful script
off which hangs a quickfire repertoire of physical and absurdist
motifs. Trevor Stuart and Julie Eckersley draw on a never-ending
palette of outrageous characters that mix low camp with high
philosophising. Bestowed further perspective by directors Scott
Maidment and Sue Rider, plus live swashes of music from Shenzo Gregory,
they depict in broad strokes the obsessions that made and marketed the
artist: death, onanism, ordure, incest, rotting things and lashings of
Catholic guilt all feature. All you need to make up your own mind
whether Dali was a genius, buffoon or plain wanker. Nick Awde

The Seinfeld Conspiracy
Hill Street
When American comic Jerry Seinfeld was planning his TV series, an
acquaintance named Joey West suggested a plot line that showed up in an
episode five seasons later, and now Joey thinks he deserves some of
Jerry's millions. That, at least, is the premise of this solo show by
the real-life Joey, but the author-performer's inadequacies destroy any
effectiveness the piece might have had as social history or satire. As
writer, West has trouble finding his subject, repeatedly getting bogged
down in irrelevant autobiography or losing sight of his point so that,
for example, he is half-way through his hour before he even mentions
Seinfeld. As performer, he has no stage presence and no awareness of
how to carry himself, weaving aimlessly about the stage, fumbling with
props, lapsing into the nervous habit of covering his mouth with his
hand while he speaks, and repeatedly forgetting his own self-written
lines, despite constant reference to a script. There are scattered
hints that West intended this as a parody of resentful nobodies and
conspiracy theories, but it comes across more as the unrelenting
harangue of a barroom bore. As argument it is unconvincing, as comedy
it is unfunny, as writing it is undisciplined, and as performance it is
embarrassing. Gerald Berkowitz

Seven
Affidavits on Authority C
Brandon Toropov's collection of short playlets studies power and
powerlessness in a mix of social settings, to comic or serious effect.
The seven pieces, some little more than revue sketches, observe such
rich subjects for farce or satire as a liberal arts graduate facing the
horrors of the employment market, a student's nightmare vision of
examinations, and radio pundits preaching strict morality to their
listeners while indulging their appetites off the air. More serious
scenes depict a female politician allowing her success to emasculate
her husband, a working woman venting pent-up anger at an innocent man
who has become the focus and symbol of all her oppression, and two
separate pictures of men haunted by memories of women they failed. The
easy humour of the comic pieces makes them generally more successful
than the serious sketches, which also tend to take on too many
emotionally-charged issues at once. Under the direction of Betsy
Carpenter, the four actors of TheatreBoston - John Arnold, Margaret Ann
Brady, Neil A. Casey and Rachel Grissom - impressively display their
talent and versatility in a string of quickly-established
characterisations. Gerald Berkowitz

Shakespeare
for Breakfast C Venue
This fringe perennial is always one of my first stops each festival,
with its lightweight and light-hearted humour a happy way to start the
marathon of theatre. Each year's show is different, usually some
variant on bringing characters from various plays in comic conflict
with each other. This year's version takes a different tack, turning
Romeo and Juliet into that British Christmas theatrical staple, the
panto. (Note to non-brits: a popular family entertainment with
well-established conventions) So, along with turning the family feud
into a battle of competing bakeries, allowing lots of croissant jokes,
we have a principal boy (i.e., actress in trousers) Romeo, panto dame
(i.e., man in drag) Nursie, ritualised audience participation, mild
double-entendres (e.g., Juliet's family are now the Copulates), and
incongruous insertion of pop song lyrics and dance sequences. It is all
very silly, infectiously enjoyable, and performed with verve and
polish. And you get free coffee and croissants. Gerald
Berkowitz

Sholom
Aleichem - Now You're Talking! C Venue (Reviewed in
London)Today's
memory of Jewish life in the shtetl is inevitably, happily tinged with
the work of 19th century Yiddish writer Sholom (or Shalom) Aleichem.
Adapted and performed by Saul Reichlin, it is clear these frequently
bitter-sweet tales are no nostalgia trip but as incisive and revealing
as any modern documentary. With little more than a change of headgear,
Reichlin brings to life the denizens of the village of Kasrilevkeh.
Sometimes there is a punchline to the stories, more often there is not,
but it is the getting there that counts.And Reichlin has his work cut
out: not only does he have to keep track of a flurry of characters but
also, on occasion, stories within stories within stories, such as the
rabbi worming out a crook from a group before him for judgement. All
proceedings are leavened with humour, even when the subject is serious,
such as the brothers shamed for squabbling over their father's prized
seat in the synagogue. No subject is too great to be filtered through
the village perspective for the understanding of all - world figures
such as Dreyfus and Rothschild jostle with the intimate domesticity of
matchmakers and children's Hanukah money. The real magic kicks in
during the second half when Tevye the Milkman launches into a
shaggy-dog story of how he stumbled into ownership his first cow. It is
so easy to see how this and other stories inspired Fiddler on the Roof.
Reichlin gives a fluid performance that is more drama than
storytelling, which - not to make comparison between the genres - opens
it up to a wider audience. Nick Awde

Shut EyeTraversePhiladelphia's
Pig Iron Company and legendary alternative theatre director Joseph
Chaikin combine forces for this poetic and visually splendid
exploration of sleep and sleeplessness. In a string of seemingly
unrelated scenes we encounter a handful of vaguely connected
characters: a man in a coma from an automobile accident, his sister,
the businessmen in her office, an overworked and sleep-deprived bride,
an insomniac, and some mystic musicians. With carefully choreographed
transitions the play follows the logic of dreams, jumping about in time
and space from one plot line to another, with characters appearing
incongruously in each other's scenes. The whole is driven more by
recurring themes and symbols - muffins, missing data, music and
movement up and down a long ladder - than by linear logic, which
offended some critics. But if you give yourself over to it, it is both
beautiful to see - there's an aerial ballet that is breathtaking - and
extraordinarily evocative of the mysteries of sleep. Gerald
Berkowitz

Shut
Up, I'm Your Mother! Gilded Balloon Teviot
Subtitled "the world of mothers and daughters", this string of wicked
sketches is a romp through the generations and social orders with
characters brought to life by Lorraine Molins (who also writes) and Zoe
Lyons that deliver a few home truths with delicious wit. There's a
14-year-old who resists maternal pressure to be bouncy and beautiful,
aghast at her outgoing mother's trendiness, while at the other extreme
there's a cloyingly close relationship of a posh young woman comparing
sexual notes with her understanding, exploitative parent - cross, bi,
group, trans, nothing shocks. Then there are the trailer trash East
Enders whose preparations to go out for the night indicate that putting
on make-up is no different to warpaint, followed by an endearing, epic
ramble about a harassed daughter trying to get her crabby old mother
safely into her surprise 75th birthday party. A more serious side pops
up in short but sweet monologues such as the telling titled GNVQ - A
Schoolgirl's Lament. Playing against a set of giant interlocking
picture frames, Molins and Lyons radiate gentle humour that hides quite
a bite through the easy delivery of these accomplished comic actors. Nick
Awde

Slaves of Starbucks Hill
StreetIt has
nothing to do with coffee, but Canadian Peter Aterman's solo show is a
nightmare vision of the American century. His mode is a string of
revue-style sketches ranging from the lightly comic to the deeply
disturbing, and inevitably their effectiveness is hit-and-miss. While
some pieces, like the picture of boorish American tourists abroad or
the contrasting announcements on Dutch and German airlines, poke easy
fun at easy targets, others, such as the academic finding hidden
political messages in comic books or the TV chat show encounter between
a communist dictator and an all-American teenager, leave it unclear
just who is being satirized. In the most successful sketches, Aterman
presents a skewed vision that is far more disturbing than mere satire.
Celine Dion, Adolph Hitler and Andrew Lloyd Webber make an unlikely and
scary combination, while a deadpan account of obscene violence in a
shopping mall embodies much that is terrible about America. The
programme is handicapped by Aterman's tendency to slip into a private
language or symbolism that makes some sketches or bridging sequences
opaque, and judicious editing could significantly strengthen the effect
of the whole. Gerald Berkowitz

A Slight Tilt to the Left Assembly Michael
Mears' solo show is an amiable, low-key shaggy dog story that makes its
quiet points with admirable delicacy. Mears plays a man coping with the
aftermath of his father's death and with the comic complications
arising from the seemingly simple task of choosing a headstone. While
his brother obsesses over details like typefaces, and in the process
exposes his difficulty coming to terms with the death, the narrator
seems to have bypassed the textbook steps in grieving. Inevitably, as
the process of getting the headstone right lingers on for over a year,
his facade cracks, and we realize at play's end that he is only now
ready to begin the journey to acceptance. Directed with unobtrusive
sensitivity by Guy Masterson, Mears portrays a variety of comic
characters, from flu-ridden vicar to mousy undertaker, in addition to
the contrasting brothers, but the backbone of the piece is the subtle
and considerate way in which he guides us into the heart of a man who
feels more deeply than he realises. Gerald Berkowitz

Somehow I Feel DirtyCThe title
of Fuse Productions' signature piece is the weakest thing about it,
giving no real sense of its subject, performance style or quality. The
group-created play uses scripted scenes, mime and solo bits to follow a
handful of characters from birth to adulthood, touching with
sympathetic humour on all the milestones and pitfalls of growing up.
The attractive cast of five are first seen mewling and puking as
newborns, but race through the steps to school age in less than a
minute. We then follow them through childhood in a series of vignettes
which will frequently have two or more things going on simultaneously
in different corners of the stage. Things slow down for adolescence
and, judging from the response of the younger members of the audience,
scenes of awkward first dances, suicidal depression, and first
experiences of sex and alcohol are particularly accurate and telling.
The play ends with the characters on the cusp of adulthood, as ready to
face it as anyone ever is. The three boys in the play tend to be seen
as a group, whether of rambunctious schoolkids or blokeish young men,
though Ben Davies stands out in a monologue in which he realizes he has
outgrown his need for his absent father. The girls are more
individualised, Sarah Coyle's bossy youngster dominating Anna Morris's
mousy sidekick only to have Morris's character prove the more mature
and successful teen. Gerald Berkowitz

Something ElseC
too Tall
Stories Theatre have adapted the picture book by Kathryn Cave and Chris
Riddell into a quietly pleasant one-hour play for children. The title
character is a strange beast shunned by all the other animals because
he is different. When he encounters a similarly lonely Something, his
first instinct is to reject it because it isn't exactly like him, but
good sense wins out and he discovers that they can be friends and play
together even if they aren't exactly alike. The three performers
present the story with unthreatening charm, punctuating the action with
quiet songs. Sharon Morwood's sweetly childlike Something Else is
balanced by Angela Laverick's more boisterous Something, while Toby
Mitchell provides genial narration. Some jokes, like giving a pair of
rabbits a hip-hop song, may be well over the heads of the audience, and
in general the piece may be a bit too understated. The under-fives in
the audience watched attentively but seemed engaged only by the most
active rushing-about scenes, and the subtle moral may have required an
after-show chat with mother to sink in. Gerald Berkowitz

The SplitPleasance Dome Frank H.
Strausser's new play is a seriocomic view of divorce American style
that is conceived and performed on the level of a made-for-TV movie and
never really transcends its genre. The golden couple played by Steve
Wilder and Mabel Aitken split up but decide to stay close, literally
dividing their house down the middle by a wall, with Paula Jennings'
wise-cracking au pair serving as messenger and spy for each side. No
points for guessing that they get together again by the end, though you
might not have predicted that the image of Jean Harlow (who may or may
not have once lived in this house) would be introduced briefly, only to
be discarded as a dramatic dead end. And the most interesting thing
about a handful of subsidiary characters doubled by Kate Harper and
Edward MacLiam is that, for a play set in Hollywood, not one has a
screenplay they're trying to peddle. Under Yvonne McDevitt's direction,
everyone acts in the broad, signifying mode one associates with the
second-banana neighbour figures in an American sitcom. On that
undemanding level, the play offers a harmless afternoon's entertainment.
Gerald Berkowitz

Jovanka Steele...But Enough
About MeGilded Balloon Teviot
Luckily for us, LA-born Jovanka Steele has put in enough time each side
of the Atlantic to earn the authority to launch into both cultures with
withering accuracy. And so she holds up a mirror to both sides
propelled by an infectious, chatty style that makes even the most
mundane observation compelling ­ such as confronting an English
boyfriend with the obvious as, teeth on edge, he mutters invective
against American tourists mispronouncing our wonderful London place
names, or the trials endured by the hard-up comedian temping in offices
where everyone's a joker ('You can use that in your next show, ha, ha,
ha!') It's intriguing to guess what's real and what isn't ­ eye-witness
accounts of confusing a thug attempting to mug her after she's just
broken up with a lover or her shotgun-wielding, drugs dealer father
sorting out a lost remote control situation keep the audience working
overtime. The pace is fast but it's when Steele pauses and lets her
real personality shine through that you really feel the comic force.
Easily my favourite of the Festival, if only for the bizarre impromptu
Tabasco incident for a sizzling though gut-wrenching finale. Nick
Awde

StitchingTraverse The
newspaper critics almost without exception completely misunderstood
Anthony Neilson's new play, and based their sometimes outraged reviews
on the misunderstanding of what is actually a very tender and moving
story of failed love. The problem is that the play juggles three time
frames, deliberately and legitimately withholding key information until
the end. We see a couple trying to decide whether to have a baby when
their relationship is already rocky, we see them facing a later deep
tragedy, and we see them after that, when she is so emotionally wounded
that the only way she can deal with him is by closing down entirely and
acting like a cold-hearted whore. (The critics thought those scenes
were somehow part of the pre-baby bickering.) When Neilson guides you
toward fitting the pieces together, you realise you're watching two
people trying their damnedest to find some way to reach out to each
other and stay together against all odds, and that's very moving. The
author directs Selina Boyack and Phil McKee in impeccable performances,
she a monument of wounded self-protection and he a puppy dog refusing
to be rejected. Gerald Berkowitz

SuckerAssembly
Cheekily introducing himself as a 'spoken word performance artist',
Lawrence Leung launches into a humorous history of the world's classic
con tricks. A biographical ramble recounts growing up in an Australian
Chinese family where his lack of ambition is a disappointment to his
mother but a boon to his cardsharp uncle. Each episode prompts a
dissection of the relationship between con artist and sucker and a
fresh example of how he learned the tricks of the trade. Each recreated
scam is aided by a mixed media presentation that includes tantalisingly
live video close-ups and a flurry of terminology such as the different
styles of shuffling and the ritual known as 'farting the cards'. The
tricks themselves are few ­ there's a lot of padding ­ while Leung is
not the most natural of performers and neglects to take advantage of an
audience practically hurling itself onstage for a crack at
participation. Nevertheless his disarming delivery and enthusiasm
gamely maintains a level of showmanship throughout, underpinned by a
nice line in cheesy one-liners ­ phrases like 'sleight of hand for the
slight of mind' will always keep them groaning with delight. Nick
Awde

Swimming in the Shallows
Pleasance
Adam Bock's comedy of unordinary folk with ordinary dreams living on
the sleepy coast of Rhode Island is a ripping, multi-level work that
keeps you hooked right till the end thanks to this near perfect
production from BrightChoice. In her quest for security, Donna (Marlo
Haas) needs to give up smoking to get no-nonsense girlfriend Carla
Carla (Celia Robertson) to marry her, while next door their middle-aged
friend Barb (Trudy Weiss) feels she has to cast off hubby Bob (Eric
Meyers) along with the other worldly possessions she's shedding as part
of her faddy Buddhist angst. Their mate Nick (Philip Bosworth) is
desperate to land a boyfriend who lasts more than three weeks and, as
is often the case, love crops up in the most unexpected of places - the
aquarium where Donna works and where The Shark (James Frost) becomes a
masterpiece of surreal logic. Director Owen Lewis has a dream of a cast
who work as hard for each other as for the audience within Carrie
Southall's shifting, simple set and witty lighting. Add bold writing
that constantly surprises and they have one of the most exciting plays
to make a splash this Fringe. Nick Awde

Talking CockPleasance
Rising from somewhere between The Vagina Monologues and Puppetry of the
Penis, Richard Herring has the audience by the balls the second he
bounds onstage to reveal a severely over-optimistic codpiece and an
awesomely infectious feel for masculine vital statistics. His latest
offering is a rummage through the strange dichotomy of reactions to the
penis in the world, punctuated by constant screen updates to statistics
issuing from the by now thousands of responses to his web site
questionnaire, cunningly split into male and female versions and
penetrating where sexologists Kinsey, Hite et al feared to. Nudged
along by a flood of frequently scrotum-tightening trivia and inspired,
truly dreadful visual puns, it's a mind-boggling journey along which
some very, very strange truths emerge ­ accompanied by an audible sigh
of recognition that we're not at all as weird as we thought we were.
This is no one-shot dick gimmick ­ Herring stands proud as he raises
interesting questions for all sexualities and the way we view each
other. But lest we get too serious, after size and shape are dispensed
with it's back to pressing questions such as 'Where have you put your
penis for fun?' Box office Viagra. Nick Awde

The
Taming of the Shrew St Augustine's
This stripped-down production from Zimbabwe's Over the Edge displays an
innovative quality that easily rivals International Festival fare. Clad
in sumptuous costumes best described as Afro-Renaissance, the all-male
cast juggles life-size mannequins to double and triple characters while
utilising the stage to its full, shifting a simple set of stools and
frames to create doors, stoves, bowers and verandas at will. Adam
Neill's Petruchio is a sophisticated suitor who cannot resist a
challenge - his charisma is both his weapon and defence in his
determination to break the object of his affections. Deliciously
psychotic, he peppers his wit with an almost shocking physicality. As
Kate, Zane E Lucas is feisty - naturally ­ but he also gives a
portrayal of a woman prepared to fight to her last using only the
limited ammunition granted her sex in an unequal, enclosed society.
Meanwhile Michael Pierce's sly, coquettish Bianca is fought over by
Craig Peter's Luciento and Gavin Peter's Hortensio ­ a magnificent
comic duo ­ aided and obstructed in turn by Wiina Msamati, whose Tranio
scurries between the protagonists with meticulous absurdity. Nick
Awde

Tangled CO2
From Australia comes a solo show written and performed by Noni
Bousfield that tries to be both an intense psychological study and an
attack on the culture of media celebrity, and is almost as successful
as it hopes to be. The author plays a young woman who seems to have
accidentally killed a child and is now hiding out in Australia's
outback. As she becomes more and more cut off from news of the search
for her, she begins to see the ironies in her earlier dreams of fame
and fortune, even as the isolation takes its toll on her mental health.
Scattered hints in the text, notably repeated references to the famous
dingo-and-baby case, seem to be pointing toward one sort of
shocking revelation, but when the denouement comes, it is a different
twist entirely, which you may find anticlimactic and unsatisfying.
Gerald Berkowitz

ThroatPleasance
John-Paul Zaccanini is a dancer/mime/aerialist/performance artist whose
solo performance has a number of striking moments, but doesn't add up
to much. We first see him in the guise of a drag queen kneading bread,
only to have the dough take on the shape of a babe-in-arms, sweetly
betraying his unhappiness. He watches trash TV, speaking along with the
dialogue in several languages. He attempts to flirt with every person
in the audience. He becomes a picky, demanding pop singer in rehearsal.
He climbs a rope for aerial ballets or splashes around in a pool of
water, the ripple effects projected on a screen. Some of it is lovely.
If there is a subject, it is loneliness, as he portrays the isolate,
the social inept, the wanker. Gerald Berkowitz

Trev and Simon UnwiggedPleasance DomeTicket-buyers
come to former TV presenters Trev and Simon already knowing and loving
them, and the two performers build their show on that assumption. There
is little attempt to warm up or ingratiate themselves with the audience
as they dive into the premise of a mock telling of their
behind-the-masks life stories. This involves Trev becoming an Ernie
Wise-style playwright, with scripts about key events in each of their
lives and, in the absence of guest stars, audience members recruited to
play supporting roles, in sequences that resemble TV's Generation Game.
For a show that thus invites audience participation, the pair prove
oddly ill-equipped to handle the almost inevitable, and are visibly
thrown off-stride by the mildest heckling. The other backbone of the
show is Trev's incessant insulting of the increasingly resentful Simon,
usually involving some variant of calling him a monkey, until the
victim's threat to walk out is forestalled only by the reminder that he
is wearing a particularly tatty monkey costume at that moment. This one
is strictly for the fans, and even they may find themselves
disappointed. Gerald Berkowitz

Tuesdays and Sundays Pleasance Dome This
delicate two-character play, written by performers Daniel Arnold and
Medina Hahn, comes from Canada trailing a string of festival awards.
Until an ending that is a bit of a letdown, the piece tells a lovely
tale of 19th century romance and tragedy, while providing a vehicle for
the two very personable actors. Arnold and Hahn play village teenagers
in 1887 who begin a courtship that is sweetly believable and
essentially innocent, despite a pregnancy that tests and strains their
unpreparedness and leads to a climax that, while believable, veers a
little too close to melodramatic cliche to be fully satisfying. The
real strengths of the piece lie in the first half, as the two actors
quietly and generously capture the complexities of first love. She can
hardly stop grinning with delight while still thinking clearly enough
to seek out subtle ways to encourage him, while he captures the boy's
confusion as waves of unfamiliar emotion and happiness run through him.
If this is not truly what first love is like, it is what we would like
to believe it is like, and the image the writer- actors conjure up is a
happy and welcome one. Gerald Berkowitz

Victory at the Dirt PalaceGarage James and
K are anchors on rival stations and when they're not reading the
autocues, they're feeding a bitter rivalry aided and abetted by slimy
PAs whose parasitic power grows with each sweaty grovel. The candour of
their self-obsessed tirades becomes all the more shocking since they
are father and daughter. As each is briefed pre-show one morning, the
first reports reach their studios of the World Trade Centre attacks and
the chance is seized to ride this once in a lifetime tidal wave of
breaking news. What ensues is a gore-fest of hyperboles, put-downs and
one-liners as the pundits vie to show who's got the biggest spin and
overnight ratings. Hard on the heels of Wreck the Airline Barrier and
The Zero Yard, The Riot Group are back with as relentless fare as ever.
Adriano Schaplin's script unleashes far more than the Lear it purports
to be by ruthlessly hacking away at an American sacred cow with all the
irony of Larry Saunders and knowingness of Network. Performed and
directed by James Schnabel, Stephanie Viola, Drew Friedman and
Schaplin, the grim, wicked humour and machine-gun delivery never strays
far from the message. Nick Awde

Andre Vincent is UnwellGilded Balloon Teviot
Some comics will go to any length to find material for their acts.
Andre Vincent developed kidney cancer. His always upbeat and frequently
very funny set is based on his experiences with doctors, hospitals,
friends and family since being diagnosed last spring. It is obvious
that his skewed sense of humour, along with the skill and dedication of
the doctors to whom he gives full credit, is what got him through the
experience, and he reserves his strongest satirical contempt for those
who lacked the same sense. Foremost, interestingly, are his fellow
comics who were unable to handle his news with any aplomb, except for
the guy whose immediate response was to put in his bid for Vincent's
DVD collection. Elsewhere, humourless nurses and a hospital
psychiatrist are the butt of his jokes; and he has passing comment to
make about Harley Street interior decor, 94-year-old racists, and
things to do in a disabled toilet. The state of his health still
uncertain, Vincent's only response is to fantasize about the most
colourful and score-settling ways to die. It is a remarkably happy hour
that leaves us wondering only what he will do next year to top it. Gerald
Berkowitz

We
Haven't Said a Porky Pie YetPleasance
Random conversations taped from members of the public are snipped and
edited into a stream of soundbites, religiously marking every "um" and
"er" courtesy of speech wizards Jo Harper, Rachael Spence, Louise
Wallinger. But the audience cannot hear the original aural collage;
instead it is relayed to the performers via minidisc earphones which
they in turn simultaneously reproduce aloud and verbatim. Cut into
pieces for individuals as well as groups, Non Fiction's verbal meltdown
is a provoking mix: sometimes obvious, such as the hilarious recounting
of feminine intimate depilation in Hair Removal or internet jokers
using fake chatroom IDs in Love on Lycos. Others are utterly left-field
and catch you unawares, such as the unexpected pathos in the gay
soldier's tale. This is no Creature Comforts, however ­ just talking
heads. Mark Wing-Davey directs only from the neck upwards so it takes
the actors time to flesh out a character. The fact that the speeches
are devoid of context makes this a success but it needs more of a
concept to rise above what is admittedly a hugely entertaining flip
through the contemporary sound archives. Nick Awde

Who Is Bobby Lopez C cubed This
post-midnight show actually benefits from a party-minded late night
audience, since uninhibited reaction energises performer Jud Charlton
while aptly fitting the monologue's skewed absurdism. Backed by a team
of technicians armed with videotapes and a live camera, Charlton tries
to make contact with the mythical Lopez, a process that somehow
involves telephone conversations with onscreen characters played by
himself and the sacrifice of bunny rabbits named after dictators. The
rest of the show is putatively filler until Bobby's arrival, with
Charlton meandering comically through accounts of a haunted CD player
that will only play Nearer My God To Thee, the life and history of
Victorian crusading journalist W. T. Stead, and his own attempts to
convince the job centre that he has the qualifications to be a Time
Lord. A foul-mouthed ventriloquist's dummy makes an appearance at one
point, and it comes as no surprise that Bobby's arrival is delayed
until tomorrow night. The show's inventiveness and bizarre wit deserve
a larger audience than its late slot is likely to bring it, but perhaps
only late-night audiences can best appreciate it. Gerald
Berkowitz

The Whole Shebang Assembly
Rooms(Reviewed
last year)
There's a scene in the film The China Syndrome in which Jack Lemmon,
attempting to convey essential technical information while
over-excited, becomes tragically incoherent. Jack Klaff's current solo
show has much of the same quality. Klaff has something very important
and exciting to tell us about modern science, but he doesn't seem quite
sure what it is, and very little that is clear survives his confused
and passionate intensity. Klaff spent two years as the resident
humanist in a cutting-edge scientific think tank, and discovered things
about science and scientists that excite him, things that amuse him,
and things that appall him, and he wants to tell us everything in one
unstructured and under-rehearsed rush. He jumps frantically from topic
to topic, from personal anecdote to technical explanation, sometimes in
mid-sentence. He passes around a couple of glasses full of something
without making clear what they're supposed to demonstrate (and,
besides, it's too dark in the audience for us to see whatever we're
supposed to see in them). He tells stories that have no point, promises
revelations that never come. Part WI lecture, part Speakers Corner
rant, this unfocused, un-thought-through jumble is far from the
polished theatre pieces audiences have come to expect from Klaff. Gerald
Berkowitz

Who's Harry?Pleasance Dome
Welcome to the world of sales and marketing where grandly titled
'executives' slide from one bubble to another ­ both professionally and
personally. For these wannabe city slickers lying is a way of life and
none more so than Icarus. Until he meets Harry, that is. Her own brand
of mendacity is equally breathtaking and creates a passionate tension
between the two that breaks down the barriers with each self-deluding
porkie. Writer Henry Fleet and director Pip Pickering have forged a
fast-paced comedy that never takes its finger off the comic pulse. The
result is akin to Glengarry Glen Ross on acid and, though the symbolism
can get a touch OTT, it forms a wicked snapshot of United Kingdom plc.
Meanwhile, choreographer Christopher Dennis peppers the action with a
physicality that drives the verbal slapstick of snappy criss-cross
dialogue ­ a gift this talented cast uses well. Omer Barnea and
Henrietta Clemett shine as the star-crossed lovers surrounded by the
scary office flotsam of Kevin Bishop, Will Norris, Alastair Sims and
Ben Watson. Things are more complete when the female characters finally
join the male circle and one esepcially regrets not seeing more of
Sarah Paul's manic therapist Hope. Nick Awde

You Couldn't Make It Up Gilded Balloon
Patrick Wilde is a successful TV writer who wrote a play about a gay
youth which he had difficulty making into a film. Now he has written a
play about a successful TV writer who writes a play.... Actually that
part of this new play is its least interesting and involving element,
as the subsidiary characters and their relationships present intriguing
and touching views of the contemporary scene. And so the playwright is
a rather sad idealist, more comfortable with platonic fantasies than
actual human contact, while the object of his admiration is a straight
boy finding delayed comfort in his straightness after a childhood rape.
There's a deeply closeted case and a bitchy queen with the clearest
vision of all - all of them familiar types, perhaps, but given
individuality and life that push the movie-making plot into the
background. Gerald Berkowitz

Paul Zenon - Off the
Street, On the RoadAssembly
Zenon's latest show does what it says on the packet. Stringing together
a series of stand-up tricks, he recounts the highlights of his life
that launched a conjuror's career on the road: how he first got hooked
as a kid on holiday in Blackpool, then going from magic shop assistant
to street entertainer in Athens before launching into the big time via
the obligatory pantos, corporate functions and, er, entertaining the
troops with Mike Reid. The bollards and dustbin set hides all manner of
cues to return to his roots and cheekily rediscover hoary classics -
three card tricks, interlocking rings, storytelling using cards ­ in
the process revealing unexpected new angles. And boy does he deliver.
The running gags alone deserve a spin-off of their own, Making it all
gel is Zenon's near perfect timing in the comedy department - hardly
surprising for such a disciplined magician ­ and his infectious, indeed
ruthless way of involving everyone in his slick mayhem. After all who
wants to watch po-faced Germans with perms make albino tigers disappear
up their fundaments when you can watch a prestidigitator gleefully get
well-proportioned women to stuff cards down their bras? Nick
Awde

Zipp!Assembly
This musical revue, with the premise of including selections from 100
stage musicals in 90 minutes, is polished and professional to a degree
unheard of on the fringe, and if it isn't here as a London tryout, I'll
eat Gyles Brandreth's fishnet stockings. The former MP and all-purpose
media figure devised the show and acts as its genial and quick-witted
host, the stockings showing up, naturally, in the Rocky Horror
sequence. Brandreth is backed by a trio of real singers and a pianist,
and they do manage at least a few bars of over 100 theatre songs, never
taking themselves or the material too seriously. Highlights include a
deconstruction of The Sound of Music, killing several birds by
inserting songs from other shows, an appropriately irreverent salute to
the man they call Andrew Lloyds Bank, and proudly low- budget versions
of Mackintosh-style megamusicals. This is one you needn't regret
missing in Edinburgh, because I'm sure it will be coming to a theatre
near you soon, and I can recommend it. Gerald Berkowitz